Questions regarding the 360 and XBL

nerve

So, I'm thinking of(have already decided) buying an Xbox 360, next year. I'll buy it in late January in hopes that the new chips have saturated the market, so that I don't have to endure the infamous red rings. I am finding it exceedingly difficult to wait that long, what with Halo 3 dropping later this month, but before I lay down my hard earned bills I have a couple questions that I can't seem to find answers to.

My main concern is the XBL system. Every now and then I see threads about the lag in games and I'm kind of looking for a comparison here, is it like a 50ms ping or a 100ms ping? or worse? Is a gold account required for playing every game online(not including xbla stuff)? If my will power is as weak as I think, 70% chance of a good console isn't that bad, right?

*cough* the only good games on the system are shooters *cough*:roll:

Faricazy

don't all HDMI consoles now have 65nm chips?

tracertong

You can see your ping being green, yellow, or red in some games but I havent ever seen a real number...and yes you need a gold membership to play. You can sign up for the per month billing where its only $8 if money is REALLY an issue

deadonthestreet

Faricazy wrote: »

don't all HDMI consoles now have 65nm chips?

No.

Local H Jay

Lag isn't that bad, just depends on the game and number of players.
Shadowrun with 16 peoples is UBERLAG.
Gears any game is mostly no lag.
So yeah. If you yourself have a good connection you probably won't have much to worry about.

GroovyMr1337

I'd say consistently around 50ms in most games.

deadonthestreet

As to the lag issue, XBL does not have its own game servers in most cases. Most games are hosted by one of the people playing. Your lag depends largely upon the connection and proximity of the player hosting the game.

Fatty McBeardo

I have by today's standard a relatively slow connection (shared T1, 1.5meg down and up for 20 apartments) and Live games are very fast for me. Never had a problem with lag, knock on wood.

JHunz

Is a gold account required for playing every game online(not including xbla stuff)?

A gold account is required for playing every game online, including XBLA stuff.

JCRooks

Most of it depends on your own Internet connection. Xbox LIVE isn't suddenly going to make things better, if your broadband connection is less-than-par in the first place. Then it depends on the connection speeds of all the other players in your game. If you've got one really laggy person, unfortunately he/she is going to slow down everyone else.

I'd say it's pretty similar to PC multiplayer gaming overall. I haven't noticed much difference between the two.

BTW - The best place to check your connection speed is by using the broadband tools at DSLReports: http://www.dslreports.com/tools. Knowing is half the battle!

nerve

Sorry to bump an old thread, but one thing I didn't remember to ask was the whole SD vs HD argument. I do not currently own a HDTV, though I intend to get one late '08, and I am curious just how bad games like Gears are going to look on my plain old TV set? I realize that only a fraction of the population have true HD setups, but it seems to be mentioned so prominantly in reviews and it makes me wonder.

Thanks.

Xenogears of Bore

nerve wrote: »

Sorry to bump an old thread, but one thing I didn't remember to ask was the whole SD vs HD argument. I do not currently own a HDTV, though I intend to get one late '08, and I am curious just how bad games like Gears are going to look on my plain old TV set? I realize that only a fraction of the population have true HD setups, but it seems to be mentioned so prominantly in reviews and it makes me wonder.

Thanks.

The only games with problems on SD tvs are some of the earlier titles. Kong and Dead Rising in particular have almost unreadable text. Besides that? Not a problem at all.

Brym

In fact, some games overcompensated for the Dead Rising problem and now their text is ONLY readable on SD sets (I'm looking at you, Catan!)

Inglorious Coyote

I'm still stuck with an old 19" SDTV, and the new CoD4 beta still looks damn good.

So yes, a 360 is still worth it if you only have an sdtv

Daybreak

I don't get why people would think the games would look bad on an SD TV. I mean, they're not going to look as good as HD of course, but bad? Why would they? The original Xbox looked amazing in SD, and the 360 is only an improvement on that.

The_Scarab

Your lag on XBL will be the same as your lag anywhere else. XBL is no different than regular internet on your PC. Its not some magic that will cause more or less lag. Its just online play through games.

The only problem is not many games have dedicated servers, so if you dont want lag play matchmaking games. Microsofts universal matchmaking will select the best connection for host. Custom games do not.