Going Backwards with nVidia

Posted by: Mhaddy at 10:29 AM 

The Xbox 360 backwards compatibility story continues to get richer and richer. One of the biggest hurdles that Microsoft has to face in trying to get the 360 backwards compatible with the original is not to do with the processing power (three 3.2GHz PowerPC cores vs. one 733Mhz chip); rather, it has to do with the GPU. The original Xbox featured an nVidia GPU but the 360 features an ATI GPU. In order to run Xbox games that have specific calls to nVidia hardware, MS would have to somehow emulate the nVidia GPU – a feat that, while not impossible, would prove to be extremely difficult to do through reverse engineering. What MS needed, was a license agreement with nVidia and in a story on 1up.com, it has been confirmed that MS and nVidia have reached an agreement. No details have been released, but with confirmed reports of PS3 being fully backwards compatible with all PS1 and PS2 games, this is definitely good news for the Xbox community.

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