What's in the X-Box

The X-Box will deliver graphics and audio hardware well beyond today’s consoles. At its core is a custom NVIDIA graphics processor capable of rendering up to 300 million polygons per second, almost five times the maximum rate of the Sony PlayStation 2. The graphics chip shares the work with a customized Intel Pentium III central processor and an as-yet-unspecified audio chip that provides 64 voices and 3-D audio (following the Interactive 3-D Level 2 standard). The chips connect to 64MB of memory via a 200MHz system bus.

The X-Box includes a minimal operating system kernel in ROM, based on Windows 2000, that initializes the machine, loads games, and implements a few low-level functions that all games need (e.g., disk access). The bulk of the operating system is actually a set of libraries, based on the Win32 and DirectX APIs, that developers ship on disk with their games. The X-Box loads the libraries and games from a Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) player, which also plays movies and audio CDs. An 8GB hard disk enables users to save and restart games and enables developers to cache time-sensitive data (e.g., audio clips) loaded from the DVD player.