"I'd be very surprised if these hardware features were implemented on the PC any time soon," we're told. "Microsoft has a very specific revision of DirectX (or Windows Graphics Foundation) for Xbox 360, just as they did with Xbox 1. DirectX for the PC includes no hardware specific instructions, because DirectX has to be 10 times more generic to work on a PC platform and the myriad of hardware configurations. I don't think it will happen. Plus the architecture of the Xbox 360 is closed box - that means we can do special things there which have no comparison in the PC space.

"We practically have AA for free on the PC anyway right now. If the difference between 1280x1024 with no AA and 1280x1024 with 2x AA is 90 FPS and 70FPS, who wouldn't turn the AA on? The performance hit isn't going to be noticeable to most gamers - and with an X800 or X850 those kind of frame rates are common place."

Richard: "Microsoft weren't focused on hardware backwards compatibility early on… that wasn't in the specification. They believed that any compatibility they could get would come in through a software layer, and they didn't want to compromise this generation's hardware for the sake of last generation's games.

"They have implemented compatibility purely through emulation (at the CPU level). It looks like emulation profiles for each game are going to be stored on the hard drive, and I imagine that a certain number will ship with the system. They already have the infrastructure to distribute more profiles via Live, and more and more can be made available online periodically.

"Emulating the CPU isn't really a difficult task. They have three 3GHz cores, so emulating one 733MHz chip is pretty easy. The real bottlenecks in the emulation are GPU calls - calls made specifically by games to the Nvidia hardware in a certain way. General GPU instructions are easy to convert - an instruction to draw a triangle in a certain way will be pretty generic. However, it's the odd cases, the proprietary routines, that will cause hassle."