Interview: ATI and the Xbox 360

Unified v separate on the PC, and Nvidia’s stance

Nvidia have previously stated in public that they do not believe that unified shader architectures are the way forward. Windows Graphics Foundation 2, the version of DirectX that will ship with Longhorn, will be designed around the idea that the graphics card will have unified vertex and pixel pipelines, but will not require that to be the case. Given that ATI is working with Microsoft now on unified parts on next-gen DirectX, whilst Nvidia is saying that it doesn’t think this is the best idea, does Richard think that Nvidia will suffer, in the long run, on the PC platform from not following Microsoft?

“I’d love to say yes… I’d love to say that Nvidia are going to be stuck when it comes to Longhorn. But actually I do think they will have a unified shader architecture by the time WGF2 comes around. This time around, they don’t have the architecture and we do, so they have to knock it and say it isn’t worthwhile. But in the future, they’ll market themselves out of this corner, claiming that they’ve cracked how to do it best. But RSX isn’t unified, and this is why I think PS3 will almost certainly be slower and less powerful.

“Talking to the guys at Microsoft, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the future is for unified pipelines, there’s no doubt.”

Of course, the great news for ATI is that they’ll be on the second revision of their unified architecture by then, just as Nvidia is getting started.

Conclusions

So Richard has told us some really interesting stuff. His comments about backwards compatibility for the 360, and the architecture of the Xenos ATI chip have really given us some insight that was unavailable before. His thoughts about the comparisons between 360 and PS3 also shed some new light on the differences between the two consoles, and how the technology is going to affect PC gamers over the coming years. We’d like to say a big thanks to Richard for taking the time out to chat with us, and we look forward to bringing you some more industry insight in a couple of weeks time.