US XBOX - HDTV Options - What are they

Gary D

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Does anyone know what extra options the US XBOX has for HDTV? What kind of TV do i need to make use of them?

The price of the US XBOX has dropped to £137 ($199) and the games have dropped to $29 - so it may be worth buying one?

Garyd
 
You need a display which is capable of accepting progressive signals as well as high definition signals.

XBOX has 3 options which you can enable with high definition pack.

480p
720p
1080i

I own US XBOX with high definition pack, and the progressive image is well worth the money.
 
and he's telling the truth..;)
as far as I know all US Xbox games support progressive, at least I've played most of them and haven't found one that doesn't..
 
By the way, XBOX does not support true high definition resolution.

The maximum resolution Conexant video encoder (which encodes HDTV resolutions independantly from the CPU or XGPU) can take from XGPU is 1024*768.

It takes the rasterised frame and encodes it at a give resolution and outputs it. If you render your scene at 640*480 and tell the encoder to output it at 1080i or 720p, that's what it's going to do: ouput a 480p image at 1080i or 720p. if the rendering resolution doesn't match the output resolution, it's just going to scale the image 'to fit'.
Therefore, true HD resolutions of 1920*1080(i) or 1280*720(p) are not possible on XBOX.

"XBOX's High-Definition support" is marketing term from M$.
 
Oh, and it lacks in quantity of RAM to render at those high resolutions, too. (since it shares total 64MB of RAM among the entire system.)

Another thing is that the bandwidths of the DDR SDRAM used in XBOX is 6.4 GB/s which is not enough for high resolution games.

480p progressive is good enough for $200 console games/machines. :D
 

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