A silly question about consoles and PCs

[Captain tycho]

Now, looking at Xbox and other console hardware, I'm rather struck by how relatively low end the parts they use are. For example, the Xbox uses a 733mhz CPU, a 200mhz GPU, and only 64 megs of RAM, yet still manages to deliver great framerates. Yet when you look at a typical gaming computer, you have at face much more powerful components.
Now, I've heard that the reason the Xbox can deliver games the way it can is because of its operating system, and because it doesn't have to do anything else.

Why can't you do this for a PC? A small, tiny OS designed purely to play games, and hardly anything else. I'm hardly an expert at this sort of stuff, but wouldn't this give incredible performance boosts to PC games?

[phongn]

Now, looking at Xbox and other console hardware, I'm rather struck by how relatively low end the parts they use are. For example, the Xbox uses a 733mhz CPU, a 200mhz GPU, and only 64 megs of RAM, yet still manages to deliver great framerates.

The Xbox's graphics capabilities are grossly inferior to any computer. Does it look good? Sure. But it also only needs to produce 640x480 @ ~30FPS most of the time. (yes, I am aware that there are 720p and 1080i modes for some games).

Yet when you look at a typical gaming computer, you have at face much more powerful components.
Now, I've heard that the reason the Xbox can deliver games the way it can is because of its operating system, and because it doesn't have to do anything else.

The OS is a stripped-down W2K kernel. It doesn't have to worry about the bulk of a general-purpose OS but that's more an issue for memory.

Why can't you do this for a PC? A small, tiny OS designed purely to play games, and hardly anything else. I'm hardly an expert at this sort of stuff, but wouldn't this give incredible performance boosts to PC games?

Probably not. Windows itself is not a great load on a computer.

[Keevan_Colton]

The fact that you can code for a definitive set of hardware makes riding the edge of the performance capabilities possible.

[Arrow]

Why can't you do this for a PC? A small, tiny OS designed purely to play games, and hardly anything else. I'm hardly an expert at this sort of stuff, but wouldn't this give incredible performance boosts to PC games?

As long as you're not doing a lot of background processing, or have a bunch of programs open, you're not going to seeing any kind of performance boost over Windows. XP's scheduler does a good job of giving games the CPU cycles they needs.

[Jawawithagun]

Also, an X-Box programmer can be absolutely sure as to what hardware the customer will use to play his game with. Therefore certain optimizations are possible.

[Praxis]

Now, looking at Xbox and other console hardware, I'm rather struck by how relatively low end the parts they use are. For example, the Xbox uses a 733mhz CPU, a 200mhz GPU, and only 64 megs of RAM, yet still manages to deliver great framerates. Yet when you look at a typical gaming computer, you have at face much more powerful components.
Now, I've heard that the reason the Xbox can deliver games the way it can is because of its operating system, and because it doesn't have to do anything else.

Why can't you do this for a PC? A small, tiny OS designed purely to play games, and hardly anything else. I'm hardly an expert at this sort of stuff, but wouldn't this give incredible performance boosts to PC games?

The smaller OS just means the system needs less RAM (therefore XBox needs 64 MB of RAM instead of 512; on your PC, Windows will take up a couple hundred at any point).

However, since every XBox has the same hardware, they can completely optimize everything. That gives a notable performance boost. Remember, the OS takes a lot of RAM and some processing power, but does not slow down your GPU one bit. It's not that the OS is making the PC less powerful, it's that the optimizations are letting the developers get more work out of the hardware.


Also, there's the fact that unless you're using a HDTV, the XBox is ONLY outputting 640x480 at 30 FPS. If you set your PC down to that level you'll see the difference.

[Captain tycho]

Ah, this clears up things quite a bit. Thanks.

[Uraniun235]

The smaller OS just means the system needs less RAM (therefore XBox needs 64 MB of RAM instead of 512; on your PC, Windows will take up a couple hundred at any point).

Dude, I don't know what you've infested your PC with (whether it be some godawful viruses or bloated-like-Micheal-Moore skins), but even WinXP generally won't gobble up a "couple hundred" megs of RAM, and the greater amount it does use can be cut down by disabling a lot of the frilly visual effects.

[SPOOFE]

The Xbox's graphics capabilities are grossly inferior to any computer.

Are they inferior to a 733 mhz PIII with 64 megs of RAM and a GeForce 3 video card?

[Chardok]

The smaller OS just means the system needs less RAM (therefore XBox needs 64 MB of RAM instead of 512; on your PC, Windows will take up a couple hundred at any point).

Dude, I don't know what you've infested your PC with (whether it be some godawful viruses or bloated-like-Micheal-Moore skins), but even WinXP generally won't gobble up a "couple hundred" megs of RAM, and the greater amount it does use can be cut down by disabling a lot of the frilly visual effects.

Please tell me how to do this. I don't need 85% of the crap that windows does.

[phongn]

The Xbox's graphics capabilities are grossly inferior to any computer.

Are they inferior to a 733 mhz PIII with 64 megs of RAM and a GeForce 3 video card?

I probably should be been more precise in my statement; I was referring to more modern computers and those of the P3-era.

Please tell me how to do this. I don't need 85% of the crap that windows does.

You'd be amazed how much stuff is important in Windows. Turning off the Theming Service will save you some RAM but with even an old Matrox G400 the performance gain in doing so is negligible. You can shut down a lot of other things, but generally it isn't worth it.

[Dahak]

You'd be amazed how much stuff is important in Windows. Turning off the Theming Service will save you some RAM but with even an old Matrox G400 the performance gain in doing so is negligible. You can shut down a lot of other things, but generally it isn't worth it.

And twiddling with services has the disadvantage that only Microsoft really knows, what all depends on a given service. You certainly won't know by just looking at the name of it...

[Ace Pace]

The smaller OS just means the system needs less RAM (therefore XBox needs 64 MB of RAM instead of 512; on your PC, Windows will take up a couple hundred at any point).

Dude, I don't know what you've infested your PC with (whether it be some godawful viruses or bloated-like-Micheal-Moore skins), but even WinXP generally won't gobble up a "couple hundred" megs of RAM, and the greater amount it does use can be cut down by disabling a lot of the frilly visual effects.

I don't know what you run, but running all the nice services, trillian, a firewall, drivers, anti virus and some other side stuff racks it up to 250 easily, nevermind running browsers.

[phongn]

I don't know what you run, but running all the nice services, trillian, a firewall, drivers, anti virus and some other side stuff racks it up to 250 easily, nevermind running browsers.

Trillian, most firewalls, antivirus, etc. are not part of Windows XP. I think I've seen XP alone at around 60MB or so on a clean boot (and W2K down to 45MB)

[Xon]

Please tell me how to do this. I don't need 85% of the crap that windows does.

Turning the Theaming system off and selecting the setting the visual settings under My computer properties -> Advanced -> preformance settings -> "adjust for best performance". This kills the ~400ms artificial delay when opening menus as they "fade" in.

Oh, and killing the indexing service.

Thats about all you need todo for tweaking a Windows XP box. And leave it running for several days while using it. Then it will optimize both boot times and application launch times with some behind the scenes trickery which requires waiting till your computer is idle after at least 12 hours.

The OS is self-turning for the most part, you just need to use it and it tries to figure out the rest.

Any actual core OS tweaks require non-trivial knowladge and will in general cripple backwards compadiblity(which you never knew you needed untill it breaks) for less than 1% improvement in preformance.

Or require some exotic blue moon in alignment with the colour blue to make a difference in preformance for high speed webservers under hardware breaking loads.

[Ace Pace]

Also, how do I turn on this Super Prefetching I keep hearing about?

[Xon]

Also, how do I turn on this Super Prefetching I keep hearing about?

Get Windows Vista

[Ace Pace]

Isn't there some XP reg tweak that makes it work?

Oh well, I can live with these boot times, its not like I'm coherent when the PC boots.

I don't know what you run, but running all the nice services, trillian, a firewall, drivers, anti virus and some other side stuff racks it up to 250 easily, nevermind running browsers.

Trillian, most firewalls, antivirus, etc. are not part of Windows XP. I think I've seen XP alone at around 60MB or so on a clean boot (and W2K down to 45MB)

My apologies, I thought this was Windows XP running more then the basics.

If its only Windows XP, yes, I expect I can make it hit 60-80MB.

[Dahak]

Thats about all you need todo for tweaking a Windows XP box. And leave it running for several days while using it. Then it will optimize both boot times and application launch times with some behind the scenes trickery which requires waiting till your computer is idle after at least 12 hours.

The OS is self-turning for the most part, you just need to use it and it tries to figure out the rest.

You can start the prefetch optimisation with "defrag c: -b" (where c: is your winsows/program partition) manually, if you want to and don't like waiting for so long.
And bootvis is a very useful tool to see what really eats up time for your booting up.
Making sure that one gets rid of unnecessary tools/drivers/programs at start-up also can do wonders for boot time...