Microsoft can stop worrying about the dozens of sources actively breaking Xbox 360 non-disclosure-agreements, as MTV finally aired MTV Presents: Xbox, The Next Generation Revealed, hosted by Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood and pop rock musicians The Killers. Make sure to check out 1UP.com's features on the Xbox 360 hardware and premiere first-person-shooter Perfect Dark: Zero for all the details. "With the first generation of Xbox, our ambition was to change the way people think about video games," said Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer at Microsoft, about the event. "Starting today with Xbox 360, our ambition is to transform the way people play games and have fun."

Initial reaction amongst Internet gamers is hesitant, mirroring the reaction to Microsoft's original Electronic Entertainment Expo presence for the Xbox. All of the games shown were obviously incomplete, and will likely undergo an enormous amount of polish in the visuals department before release.

At the event, only Perfect Dark: Zero was playable, with deathmatch modes shown. The special, however, shied from showing much in-game footage, preferring to focus on player reactions. Duncan Botwood, senior game designer at Rare, was on-hand via video to discuss the highly anticipated first-person-shooter. Tidbits about the game's technical specifications were dropped, too, such as player models being made up of roughly 5,000 polygons.

Microsoft showed behind-the-scenes of Xbox 360 hardware design prototypes and interviews highlighting Microsoft's philosophy behind the new console.

Games highlighted during special included Microsoft Game Studios' Perfect Dark: Zero, Kameo: Elements of Power, Gears of War, and Project Gotham Racing 3, 2K Sports' NBA 2K6, Electronic Arts' Madden NFL '06, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR '06, Activision's Call of Duty 2 and Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, id Software's Quake 4, Majesco Entertainment's The Darkness, THQ's Saint's Row and Ubisoft's Ghost Recon 3.

For extensive coverage of the Xbox 360, go to xbox360.1UP.com.

  Xbox 360 Xbox CPU Custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2Ghz each; 2 hardware threads per core and 6 hardware threads total Intel 733MHz Pentium III; one hardware thread CPU Floating Point Performance 115.2 GFLOPS 1.466 GFLOPS Graphics Processor 500 MHz custom-designed chip, developed by Microsoft and ATI; 48 parallel processing units (at 24 times total power) 233 MHz custom-designed chip, developed by Microsoft and Nvidia; 4 parallel processing units Total Memory 512MB GDDR3 RAM 64MB Memory Bandwidth Main memory: 22.4GB/sec; EDRAM rendering memory; 256GB/sec; frontside bus: 21.6GB/sec Main memory: 6.4GB/sec; EDRAM rendering memory: N/A; frontside bus: 1GB/sec Polygon Performance 500 million/sec 116.5 million/sec Simultaneous Textures 16; bilinear filtering 4 Pixel Fill Rate 16G/sec 3.7G/sec Compressed Textures DXT1-5 6:1 Input / Output Wireless game controllers (support for up to 4); 3 USB 2.0 ports; 2 memory unit slots; Ethernet port Game controllers (x4); Ethernet port Audio Channels More than 256 256 Audio Support 3D audio; Dolby Digital 5.1 3D audio; Dolby Digital 5.1 HDTV Support 16:9; 720p and 1080i standard 16:9; 720p and 1080i supported Software Format DVD/td> DVD1 Size 3.27" x 10.16" x 12.17" 3.5" x 10.25" x 12.75" Weight 7 lbs., 11 oz. 8 lbs., 11oz.

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.