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[Engineering Feature]
You Got Game
Tap into the design secrets behind the next generation of gaming systems.

Dave Bursky  |   ED Online ID #9707  |   February 17, 2005


Remember Pong? One of the first—and simplest—video games, Pong opened the door to a fascinating new frontier in gaming. Of course, it's now a dinosaur compared to games played on some of today's popular consoles, like Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's X-Box, and Nintendo's GameCube. They use multihundred-megahertz 32- or 64-bit microprocessors with high-performance graphics engines and DVD/CD-ROM-based software to deliver realistic experiences that send Pong's little paddles into mothballs.

With CPUs running at several gigahertz plus a high-performance video card or two, PC gaming is now just as lifelike as its console-based competition. Throw in a large-screen display, surroundsound, force-feedback peripherals, motion-capture cameras, and multiplayer capability over the Internet, and PC gamers can virtually disappear into other worlds.

And let's not forget those pocket-sized systems. Nintendo has ruled the roost with its historic Game Boy line. In fact, its new DS system incorporates wireless and touchscreen technology to add communication functions to the experience. But Sony won't be far behind with its PlayStation Portable (PSP), due for release in the U.S. on March 18. And upstarts like Gizmondo Europe Ltd. will look to use the latest technology to take handhelds beyond simple gaming. Portable gaming is getting so popular, and the technology is advancing so rapidly, cell-phone makers are getting into the act, too.

CURRENT CONSOLES
When it first appeared in 1996, the Nintendo 64 console took a technological leap to a MIPS R4300 64-bit microprocessor running at about 93 MHz. A custom coprocessor chip that handled the graphics and audio could deliver 2 million colors, 150k polygons/s, and 64 channels of audio. System memory consisted of 4 Mbytes of Rambus RDRAM-based storage, expandable to 8 Mbytes.

Just four years later, the Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) thrilled the gaming community with almost cinematic graphics based on a 128-bit custom processor called the Emotion Engine. This engine runs at 300 MHz and performs 6.2 GFLOPS. System memory consists of 32 Mbytes of RDRAM.

The companion graphics synthesizer chip runs at 150 MHz, uses 4 Mbytes of dedicated video RAM, delivers 16 million colors (24-bit color), and performs rendering at 75 million polygons/s. The internal geometry engine performs antialiasing, Bezier surfacing, Gouraud shading, Mip mapping, perspective correction, and z-buffering. Providing 48 channels, the audio subsystem can run with sample rates of 44.1 or 48 kHz.

The Sony system was one of the first consoles to include a DVD/CD optical drive, enabling use of CD-ROM/DVD disks as the game delivery system. The 4.7-Gbyte DVD disks provide plenty of storage for the high-resolution graphics. The proprietary operating system supports the original PlayStation optical media as well as standard video DVDs and audio CDs, enabling the console to double as a DVD player or an audio CD player.

With its optional remote control, users can operate the PS2 like a piece of A/V equipment. The console also supports two USB ports, an iLink port (Sony's name for FireWire/IEEE1394), two memory-card slots, and an expansion bay that can hold an Ethernet interface or other peripheral. Since its initial introduction, Sony has released a slimmer, smaller version that measures 12 by 3.125 by 7.24 in. and weighs just under 5 lb (Fig. 1).

Nintendo countered the PS2 with the GameCube in 2001. Based on a customized PowerPC CPU dubbed "Gekko" and a graphics engine developed jointly with ATI Technologies, the system delivers 1125 Dhrystone MIPS when the CPU clocks at 485 MHz. The graphics chip delivers 6 million to 12 million polygons/s (fully textured, fully lit, etc.), and the audio subsystem handles 64 simultaneous channels. The GameCube also utilizes an optical disk drive to load games. While the PS2 uses full-size disks, the GameCube employs a 3-in. drive and media that limits disk capacity to 1.5 Gbytes.

Another 2001 arrival, Microsoft's X-Box, turned a few heads (Fig. 2). First, it's the only console based on the Intel Pentium architecture (a Pentium III). Plus, it operates at a 733-MHz internal clock speed. This gives the system the highest internal data-bus transfer speed, 6.4 Gbytes/s, which is at least twice as fast as the other game systems.

A custom Nvidia graphics chip running at 250 MHz powers the graphics subsystem. The chip can produce images at speeds of up to 125 million polygons/s and support high-resolution images of up to 1920 by 1080 pixels. The accompanying audio subsystem contains a custom audio processor that supports 256 channels and Dolby AC3 encoding.

Along with a 5× DVD drive for game loading and video playback, initial versions included an 8-Gbyte hard drive to improve startup time. Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs. A unified 64-Mbyte memory subsystem supports both the CPU and graphics subsystem. Though optional on the PS2, the X-Box includes a 10/100-Mbit Ethernet port and media communications processor so the system can connect to the Internet and play online games.

Nearly three years have gone by since the release of the last major game console. Yet the rumor mills are working overtime as each company—Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony—divulges some details of its efforts in developing next-generation game platforms.

Sony inked a deal with Nvidia late last year to develop a new graphics processor based on the GeForce architecture for its next-generation computer entertainment system. The system also will be based on a new central computing engine called the Cell processor, under joint development by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM Corp. First details of the Cell processor were unveiled earlier this month at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

TURNING THE TABLES
In a flip-flop of sorts, Microsoft recruited ATI Technologies to come up with the graphics processor for its next-generation X-Box. (ATI supplied the graphics for the PS2, while Nvidia provided the graphics for the original X-Box.) Also, it looks like IBM will supply the processors for the next-generation X-Box. But the big question is whether Microsoft will leverage IBM's technology for the Cell processor, or the CPU or CPUs will take more standard approaches.

Smaller companies also are trying to "get into the game" and make an impact. XaviX Technology, a scheme developed by SSD, uses a two-part system architecture: the XaviXPort console frame and the XaviX cartridge. The XaviXPort, which connects to the TV system through an A/V cable, contains the power supply and basic control interfaces. The XaviX cartridge houses the dedicated game functions, and it is inserted into the XaviXPort to play (Fig. 3).

Games include baseball, bowling, golf, tennis, and fishing. Separate game accessories like electronic bowling balls, bats and baseballs, and fishing rods tie into the cartridge via a wireless interface. At the heart of the XaviX system is a custom multiprocessor chip deployed in each game cartridge. Thus, the XaviXPort never has to be upgraded—the game itself is the upgrade.

Dedicated game peripherals, available for either game consoles or PCs from QMotions, replace keyboards and game controllers and let players use real sports equipment for actual full-motion player participation. The Batter-up game combines sensors to replace the keyboard/joystick activation of the swing along with adjustable sleeves packed with additional sensors that can easily accommodate standard wood, metal, or plastic bats. Foot-controlled buttons enable the batter to control head-first or feet-first slides.


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    Reader Comments

    Got quite a bit wrong or misleading..the xbox started out with a 8gb harddrive and one version of the original xbox had a 10 gb harddrive and always had a harddrive, now the xbox 360 was offered with and without a harddrive.

    Anonymous -February 27, 2008

    Rating Only

    Rating Only -June 16, 2007   (Article Rating: )

    actually Xbox XBox XboX and xbOx are all the same spelling. But written differently. As long as we know what he means. Not like he wrote SNeS or anything.. :P

    Anonymous -March 19, 2005

    Wow. And I thought I was the only one. This article is pretty poor - I've read better specs and articles from gaming magazines. And most of those probably engineers. And according to the taglines, the article is supposed to divulge secrets. I didn't find any... Maybe if he actually liked games...

    rebel-x -March 18, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Sorry this guy is a moron.

    Anonymous -March 02, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    This truly is an awful article, the author must have recently got through high school using google to cut n paste all his coursework. I pity the school that has teachers dimwitted enough to let this go unnoticed.

    It is riddled with errors, or perhaps more appropriately, it has occasional accuracies.

    Mediumbug -February 28, 2005

    PSP comes out on the 24th, not the 18th, and its battery is removable, not built-in, whoever wrote this article gave little attention to accuracy.

    Anonymous -February 27, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    That was very weak.

    Anonymous Coward -February 25, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Why was this article allowed to be written, and more importantly, why was it called "Tap into the design secrets behind the next generation of gaming systems"?

    It feels like fully two thirds of this article were written in 2001 and saved for publishing until now.

    Very disappointing article.

    Anonymous -February 24, 2005

    What's wrong with this quote (less my summmation):

    "The *original Game Boy* ... systems use a reflective TFT *color* LCD ..."

    There's no point in pointing out finite technical problems with this article. There's too many large ones!

    not Anonymous -February 24, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    The popularity of portable LED electronics took off in the 1970s not in the 1980s as incorrectly stated in that poor excuse of a technology article.

    Anonymous -February 23, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    I never comment on sites. But, I have to admit, this is the second stupid article from this site featured on /. I'm tired of these idiots saying that this site is for Electrical Engineers, that's rediculous. No engineer would put up with this many innacuracies. Spelling I can forgive, typos, forgive, but when numbers, chips, and whole hard drives are left out, or plain wrong you have to wonder about the validity of ANYTHING on this site. Not /. material!!!!

    Anonymous -February 23, 2005

    No new information and much of the old information is inaccurate or flat out wrong. A waste of time.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Nothing was talked about graphic subsystems and library usage.

    Sorry not a good review.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Yawn... this was billed as "the future of gaming" when actually it should have said "a bland yawn-fest of innacurate game history"... I can't believe Slashdot referenced this, perhaps they need some feedback as well.

    Mike -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Wins the 'most misleading title' award.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Before you post trash on this comment board, keep in mind that elecdesign.com is aimed at electrical engineers (like me) and managers, not hardcore gamers.

    I don't spend my free time fantasizing about how 'realistic' the next video game would look - no matter what sort of virtual reality the PS3 will create. No way, i'm not doing that. Instead, I build robots. :cool:

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Waste of time for me to read all this. I thought maybe page 1 was build up, then page two came and it was just as bad. Page 3 had to be where the new content was right??? Wrong.....

    Mark -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    short on useful facts

    bll -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    A teaser of a title, but worthless. Do that again and you can forget this reader.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Spelling and some documented techical specs mistakes aside, the big thing about this article is that it does summarize where the gaming industry has been and where it's going in good contrast. For the lay person it's great, for the Tech-oriented maybe not so much.

    For those /.s that think they are the end all knowing beings, and only love to criticize without some of their own fact checking, let me spell it out for you...try reading the manufacturers pages on specs first before you criticize that something doesn't exist, with the attitude of "because I say it doesn't" or "something like that would cost millions...".

    Here is a list of pages you can do you own fact finding references before you shoot your mouths off!

    Nintendo GameCube http://www.nintendo.com/techspecgcn

    Sony PlayStation 2 http://www.us.playstation.com/consoles.aspx?id=2/info/PlayStation2/415007657.html

    Microsoft Xbox http://www.xbreporter.com/xbox_system_specifications.php

    The real /.s know how to read an article and judge it appropriately on authentic material, rather than ***** and complain like whiney little brats. Think first before your mouth starts flapping!

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Dave, do yourself a favor by removing that article. Not half of what's there is accurate. Sorry dude do a bit of research before, it is really embarrassing to read that.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    A highly inaccurate article, badly lacking any information about the next generation consoles (unless you consider the specs of mobile phones and Gizmondo to be of relevance).

    Why not point out that according to currently available information, all three of the next generation consoles (PS3/Xbox2/Revolution) all use CPUs based around the IBM PowerPC architecture and will all use derivatives of the next gen PC graphics chips?

    Why not talk about how consoles look set to become the media center systems al la PSX or Media Center Extender?

    Why not mention the laughable Phantom?

    Why not write an article fitting for the "Tap into the design secrets behind the next generation of gaming systems." title?

    _Pablo -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    not very useful

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Great review! Very informative.

    I like that you included the Gizmondo.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Gotta agree with the comments about how sloppy this article was....

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Way to sum up your article in the last couple paragraphs.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Decent web article .. not slashdot material though

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Did anyone learn anything by reading this? Also, no analysis, just specs...

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    I apologise for my /. colleagues, I actually got some satisfaction out of this article, although there are a couple of mistakes and typos, I feel as though it gives a pretty balanced view of the hardware supporting the uprising in home gaming/electronics.

    RichyRich -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Writing an article about the future of gaming focusing in the hardware is a really amateur approach...

    Alo -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Very poor fact-checking - the author obviously hasn't done his research and obviously isn't well-versed in the field he's writing about. Try checking your facts, at least against other paragraphs in your article!

    And yeah, us teeming hordes of Slashdot may well be hard on the author and site, but really - any article this poor on a site which advertises itself as "the authority on emerging technologies for <whatever>" deserves to be lambasted. It's blatantly non-authoritative (it even contradicts itself!), and barely even mentions emerging technology. I make that 2 for 2.

    If this is the normal quality of the of content on this site I certainly won't be browsing it on a regular basis...

    Shaper.pmp -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    2/10. No proofreading or editing, obvious lack of game experience or insight into game hardware development, and far too much cutting and pasting. Maybe the author should get some beta articles out before going gold and assuming everything's fine.

    The article may have sucked, but the comments make it all worthwhile. :) I particularly like the "32-bit/64-bit microprocessor" next gen console reference in the 3rd sentence, followed by the description, a few paragraphs later, of the PS2's processor as being "128-bit". Which is it??

    It is spelled "Xbox" -- Microsoft is very explicit about it in their game concept submission docs. But I doubt this guy would know anything about those....

    gamegirl -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    I have to agree with many of the /. entries. This article changes style which is indicative of a cut and paste operation. Many facts are incorrect, period. I also have to agree that there is little mention of the advanced systems past what has been released via ads. But then again, this site is not a major news source.

    Greg -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    "it can record video in MPEG4, H-263, ..."

    eh, got news for you : MPEG4 and H-263 are the same H263 : MPEG4 low quality H264 : MPEG4 hight quality (Advanced Audio/Video Coding : AVC/AAC)

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Filled with blatant inaccuracies, regular omissions, and lacking anything remotely resembling informed analysis.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Kinda good article.

    RKV -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    "Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs." Please check your facts, Microsoft has NOT removed the hard drive from the Xbox units ever. All systems are still sold with at least an 8 Gigabyte hard drive installed.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    No meat. As the previous poster mentioned, cut and paste writing at its finest.

    Nothing of merit in this article about the upcoming generation of consoles. If you're looking for information, look elsewhere.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    Hmmm... looks like someone found google and learned how to cut and paste... as a compilation article it's great, as far as any analysis.. well, it's a bit lacking.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    The number of factual errors here is indicative of very sloppy editing. It would be quite remarkable for the original GameBoy to sport an ARM7 processor all the way back in 1989. (Does the Z80 ring a bell, guys?)

    On top of this the Gizmondo is treated as a serious market entry. Get real. The entire valuation of the company is insufficient to launch a platform of any note. In all probability the Gizmondo will come and go without 99% of market ever hearing the name.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Full of errors. Don't you have any quality checks on your articles?

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    64bit/128bit procesor consoles do not exist. It's all marketing.

    The only 64bit cpus avaliable today are in servers (amds x86-64,intel ia64, sparc64, sh5,etc) and for home only amds 64 and powerpc64.

    There are not 128bit cpu, at least without having to spend millions $$$

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Refering to the first comment, SLI in this sense is *not* interleaving - it is the Scalable Link Interface. Roughly, one card does the top half, the other does the bottom. Old SLI (Scan Line Interleaving) refers to the dual Voodoo card powered systems of days gone by.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    SLI does interleaving: e.g. each card renders every other line, so you don't get issues with one card getting overworked.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    me thinks you missed a critical link in not mentioning the tapwave zodiac

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Fact checking, people. Jeez. Since when did the PS2 tap ATI for their "Graphics Synthesizer" GPU? It was the Gamecube that recruited ATI first for the Flipper chip.

    MrC -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    I think Nokia runs Symbian, not Sybian?

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    It's the PS2 which has had it's hard drive support removed in the new smaller remodel. The Xbox still has it's HD to this day.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    The oringinal Game Boy utilized a 8-bit Z80-type chip, not a 32-bit ARM7.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    Found two inaccuracies at a quick glance: a) it says that ATI developed the GPU for PS2 (should be Gamecube)

    b) The Gameboy Advance is actually equipped with 32kByte embedded RAM (IWRAM) and 256kByte off-core RAM (EWRAM).

    ikari_01 -February 22, 2005

    So..where are these next gen consoles analysis?

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )

    "initial versions included an 8-Gbyte hard drive to improve startup time. Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs"

    No. Xbox includes a hard drive to this day.

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005

    BTW it is spelled "Xbox", not "X-Box" nor "XBox" :)

    Anonymous -February 22, 2005   (Article Rating: )
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