I've never heard anybody mention this, but I've noticed that in most Xbox 360 games there's a bit of slowdown. For example, I've been playing Prey a bit lately, and though it runs pretty smoothly most of the time, every now and then the framerate drops pretty significantly if there's a lot of stuff onscreen. It's seems an unnatural ammount; I can't think of any Xbox, Gamecube, or PS2 game that ever suffered slowdown like that. In one place in Prey, the framerate slowed down to about 12fps when I looked at a certain corner of the room. Almost every 360 game I've played, in fact, has suffered at least a little bit of slowdown. The only game I can think of that hasn't is DOA4. Has anyone else experienced this? It seems to me that it is an unspoken rule in console gaming (at least in recent generations) that the framerate should be consistent. Is there perhaps something wrong with my Xbox 360?
I heard it was due to Microsoft cutting corners on components such as RAM to reduce costs and thus some modules are less stable than others. Inconsistencies cause some XBox360s to run full speed and others suffer varying levels of slowdown/framerate loss and so on. I'm looking for a source and will update when I locate it.
I kind of forgot that I'd put my PSU on the floor... do you think that's enough to cause significant slowdown? How much room is it supposed to have around it?
There could be a heat sensor in the psu. If it's on the floor it may cause the 360 to run things at a lower clock to use less power and prevent the psu from heating up. But that's a guess. However, why don't demos on the harddrive cause the fans to run full blast? Can the dvd drive make that much of a difference?
I have notcied that too. I remember playing fight night and my 360s fan would start to go full blast as the game was loading, yet the hard drive demo i tried off live before playing the final game and it played like normal.
Only major slowdown I saw is with Burnout Revenge when you sometimes get a medal, and a few online games.
This is correct. Though most XBox360 components don't have this sort of variation ammong units, the RAM does. I don't remember the exacts, but I do recall that the speeds they will accept is relativly vast.
Maybe your 360 has a flux capacitor! Seriously though, I don't think it's fair. If you pay that much for a system it should work just fine. If you called MS and got a replacement would they give you a good system or is it a toss up? Hopefully in 2007 things will be more stable.
I may do that, but I need to fiddle around with the placement of the PSU a bit before I do that. You're right though, about it not being fair. It's a good system, but there are some places where MS blatantly cut corners either to make the deadline or to possibly lower the price. The fucking blaring fans is the best example. I've also noticed that at random times the DVD drive will start making this terribly loud noise, sort of like a weed eater but not as loud (I know it's the DVD drive because when I eject the tray the noise instantly stops). It doesn't seem to effect the 360's ability to read data off of the discs and it doesn't cause any damage to them, but it is really, really annoying. It also doesn't make this noise if I turn the unit sideways, but why the fuck should I have to do that? It is supposedly designed to stand vertically, so there shouldn't be any compromise in doing so. Fucking Microsoft...
Another problem with 360 games currently is that it looks like developers are having problems getting decent framerates and consequently disable the V Sync so ALOT of the games suffer from tearing and problems with fast movement.
