Although we reported yesterday on potential availability issues with ATIs R520 flagship boards, it seems that there will be no such problems with the company's Xenos chip for the XBox 360.
With a worldwide XBox 360 launch rumored to take place around Thanksgiving, plans for the console's components and their production are already well in place. ATI has made certain that it has done everything right on its side and it is expected to have plenty of boards ready for X360.
The latest news from the console wars front suggests that ATIs X360 chip may have an advantage on performance over its nVidia PS3 counterpart and 4X anti aliasing, for example, is something that it will be able to deliver smoothly while the PS3 component will not.
Xbox 360 will feature 48-pipelines compared to PS3s rumored 24 and its graphics processor will have 10 MB of EDRAM so we are guessing that graphically it may be able to produce much more than MS has let on so far. One reservation regarding the X360 however is how well ATI will pull off the unified Shader Architecture that combines pixel and vertex pipelines. If that works, than nVidia's dedicated extra 6 vertex pipes will not cause X360 much concern. Microsoft is already urging developers to take advantage of Xenos' high-specs by asking them to create native FSAA 2X and 4X games.
Microsoft knows that it will have to make the most of its head start and the possible graphics advantages as quickly as possible since developers will slowly become more familiar with PS3s 7-processor architecture and will soon catch-up to, if not overtake, X360 performance wise. Initial plans for Microsoft call for a 50 per cent market share with X360 although a 35 per cent figure would seem more sensible. If Microsoft does make it with its console, it will owe a big thanks to ATI and its component which the company has produced in a responsible and timely fashion, unlike its current generation PC components.
