360 Live and backwards compatability updates

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-06-01 01:36pm

Maybe I'm incorrect then, but I thought it was 60 FPS. It looked silky smooth. I'm not sure if the Nintendo rep specificly said 60 or not though.

Well, you're the one who saw it, not me

I thought the only game to run at 60 fps was F-ZERO X and only because the devs threw out any texture and polygon that wasn't absolutely critical, which suggests that the framerate is not something that's easily changed.

Then again, I wouldn't know a bumpmap from my ankle, so take my word with a truck of salt.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2006-06-01 01:49pm

Praxis wrote: Not that easy on the PowerPC side when your PowerPC processor is tri-core (can't use all three to run single threaded code, right?), and can't do out-of-order execution.

But that makes sense, I guess.

Depends how many games made heavy use of out of order execution. Speculative path branching has it's own overheads.

Sure, emulating one chip with another is always going to be a technical challenge, but having experience with similar architecture bedded in before you start is going to help bunches when you have to get clever with it.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2006-06-01 01:53pm

Praxis wrote: Maybe I'm incorrect then, but I thought it was 60 FPS. It looked silky smooth. I'm not sure if the Nintendo rep specificly said 60 or not though.

If there was a major change in frame rate you'd need to double the number of frames of animation for every action in the gameworld. I'd suspect that if the Wii runs old games any faster than the original hardware it's by a small amount and they can more easily prevent it snarling up. (you could make the N64 choke its guts up trying to draw too much smoke in Goldeneye, f'rexample).