The latest news from the XBox 360 camp suggests that Microsoft's next-generation offering is well on schedule for a November release and may prove even more impressive than we had initially suspected.
In an article in the inquirer, images of Microsoft's XBox 360 in what is claimed to be its final hardware configuration are displayed as the machine is running ATI's Rubi hardware demo. The demonstration, part of ATI's show at Siggraph 2005, suggests that the console's rendering power will be immense and ATI claims that the Rubi model, running at 720p resolution, was rendered with 70,000 polygons while reaching, at times, as many as 120,000 polygons per character. The most extravagant claim mentioned that at its peak the demo reached one million polygons per scene. According to the Canadian graphics manufacturer, the hardware included in x360 will not be matched on the desktop until it comes up with its next-generation of hardware, meaning that the R5xx range will not be a match for x360.
As carefully planned as that boast by ATI may seem, it is hard to imagine that kind of rendering power on a current PC. All this comes as rumors that MS may up the price of its next-gen console now that Sony has confirmed and reconfirmed how far beyond the consumers budget the PS3 will be. The logic seems to be that if consumers discover that they can easily afford the x360 they may end up not respecting it.