Has the 360 finally maxed out?
Gears 1 and 2, Bioshock, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect, and Call of Duty 4 are just a few graphically amazing games that have graced Microsoft’s white box, showing machine’s power, but could that power be at its max? According to Red Faction Guerrilla developers, Volition, they have actually maxed out the Xbox 360. Speaking to Gameplayer.com, Volition goes into detail of how they pushed the hardware to its limits.
“We’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down.” They go on to say “We evaluate every little change in the game, and then we run our tools on it to make sure it isn’t going to break the game and then we move forward, so it really is about pushing the engine as far as we can, and pushing the hardware as far as we can, and then looking at what is the next set of hardware that’s going to come out.”
Damn, they are already thinking about the next Xbox, but what about this “maxing” out the Xbox 360 already business, huh? From what we have seen of the new Red Faction the game doesn’t match big guns like Gears 2, graphically, but that’s not what Red Faction is about -- the series has always been about destruction and its dense environments. Now with the amount of destruction in the maps that Red Faction is using, it may actually max out the 360 due to memory issues, but that doesn’t mean that the 360 has actually maxed out altogether. We could see bigger and better-looking games in the future, because it’s all about the engine and how good your programmers are. Not taking anything away from Volition but their engine is different from the likes of the Unreal Engine, and each utilizes the 360 in different ways. We want to hear about whether the 360 has maxed out in general -- not just for one game. Although it’s 3 years old now, the 360 has still got some power lurking underneath its hood waiting to be used.
TGR Verdict: Rumor Unlikely
Community
324 days ago
People are always going to try to say 360 is taped out. I don’t think it is, but even if it was games could still improve. It’s not all about graphics, but about doing everything you can with what your given. They can get more effiicent with how they code things etc...