Natal to Use 10-15% of Xbox 360 CPU Power

Natal is already at the top of my Christmas 2010 list, as well as several friends too. If they have the software to take advantage of it this will be a truly revolutionary experience. Fingers crossed!

10-15% is nothing.
The Xbox 360 has 3 physical cores and 6 logical cores, and developers don't use them all effectively anyways.

Not really looking forward to Natal honestly.

maybe for a game like Call of duty, but not if its going to be as shaky as a wii remote..

Did you know crossing fingers = delete
so if you do this when hovering on a game, it's gone?

Ha just kidding.

RROD to use 100% of Xbox 360 CPU Power.

Can't wait to get all "minority report" on my TV!

MS next big failure coming this xmas

That has to take an interesting bit of programming. Academic interest aside, we will have to wait and see if this makes gaming more fun, and more importantly for MS, if it actually sells any games.

Natal seems like a pretty cool stuffs. However, in the past history.. a lot of cool idea only stay cool on paper.
Is Natal cool? yes
Is Natal going to be ground breaking? not sure.. I will have to wait till I see the final product and games which support Natal.

So the next question is... how about SONY's new "wiimote(s)"?

I guess this holiday season will be a pretty fun season (I hope).

As far as gaming goes I don't know that this will take off. It remains to be seen how developers will use the technology. On the other hand.. I can see how this could revolutionize methods used for handicapped people accessing pc's and other products. No hands makes it pretty hard to used a computer. But maybe not anymore

So it would use about 2% of a real PC's CPU? =D

/slight sarcasm

I would like to see this work in some sort of real application (game) demo before I make any further judgments.

Not looking forward to Natal at all. I really couldn't care. I use my xbox for shooting games, RPGs etc, what the console is made for. So this will have no benefit to me.

Project failure...

Why not you could be holding your favorite boomstick and racking up killshots or breakout your best bokken and slash your way through those rpg's?

I'm looking forward to it myself but will reserve my decision till I see how much this accessory is going to cost. If it's more than half the cost of the console i'll probably pass or look at new console options that maybe available in that time frame.

I'm looking forward to E3 to see what developers are going to actually be do with it. The hardware's cool, but worthless if there's not compelling games.

so they are going to take 15% of the power away from an already maxed out console, AND its not coming out for at least another 6 months?

from a technical standpoint, this is going to turn into the next wii so fast...

its not like its even a cheap add-on anyway? won't it be approaching the price of the whole Xbox arcade package anyway?

this seems like a good idea, but i see it being plagued by bugs when it is released, followed by a bunch of crappy games made by developers who didn't take the time to use the new technology in a meaningful way.

I'm not interested in motion technology. No Wii or Natal for me. Just plain old controllers

I personally would like Microsoft to have an SDK for it in XNA, Imagine what indie developers can do with it if they could take advantage of the motion sensing abilities of natal, like having it do motion capture for your own animation without having to go to a studio with all those equipment. Granted it won't replace those thousand dollar hardware, but it'll do a decent job as a low budget motion capture system.

i like this person's comment. what natal is offering sounds too good to be true. and you know what, if something is too good to be true, then it probably is.

they are already removing the natal chip and will use the 360 processor. what will likely happen is that the natal will be utter crap and microsoft will say that it's due to the high usage of the 360 processor and the removal of the natal chip. but in reality, it's because microsoft can't deliver what they promise.

microsoft removed the natal chip for "The notion of offloading the processing to the 360 CPU in the name of lower costs and easier upgradability makes sense". you have to ask yourself, since when did microsoft cared for the consumer and cost? the xbox and xbox 360 cost microsoft a bunch of losses and they it didn't bother them and yet now it does. microsoft had hardware failures on their consoles and it still isn't solved. now they care? the reason for removal is bs. the reality is that this is their fall back answer to reporters when natal isn't working properly.

http://kotaku.com/5442458/report-m [...] natal-chip

http://kotaku.com/5443233/ces-burn [...] +end-games

microsoft almost revealed that their product isn't what they promised.

I agree. I don't see how any sensible person could be excited about it. They're either easily amused, hypocrites (as in hate the Wii), or completely misguided about Natal's abilities.

10 to 15 percent CPU power is nothing to get worried about, Programmers will work around that with
ease. I think Natal will take off real well, i've already seen some of their first games and i think their
going to be alot of fun to play. A Christmas party for sure! Go Natal.............

You know the Nintendo Power Glove was once promised to enhance the interactivity in video games... and we all know how that one turned out.

Yeah and about 50% of RAM storing those variables. Sure its only numbers being stored, but if Natal takes in account previous x amounts of frames for every body part, it adds up. Not to mention abit of processing is already used for the OS too. I reckons theres going to be too much lag and since, this is gonna be released in america, they need to get the fat kids moving.

Citation needed? I develop for 360 and can assure you that most/all studios are squeezing every last dreg of performance from it.

Looking forward to seeing what Natal brings to the table =)

I agree. And that would be even better if Natal is also released on PC.
And to those only want to use normal controller, what about a controller + Natal? What about playing games with your normal controller/mouse&keyboard and having gameplay enhancement added with Natal like more 3d effect (Johnny Chung Lee example...) or capability to avoid in-game bullet by moving your body/head?

I know better ways of playing games than jumping like an idiot for whole night..

Holy crap the people on this site are negative. This is something exciting and new. Programming that software and labeling those body parts must have taken thousands of hours and all of you punks hate it just because you hate MSFT for some reason. If it sucks then don't buy it. Apparently you've already passed judgement on something that hasn't even been released, ridiculous.

Get over yourselves!

15% won't be enough to get lag free motion input. sophisticated motion capture requires much more computation.
either the motion will be dumbed down to very deliberate and restrictive movements, or the lag will be so bad it will enrage gamers.