Finally some much needed boost going forward with the Xbox 720 rumors that have flooded the web in recent months. As per a new report, an Xbox 720 Durango development kit which previously went on sale for $10,000 is actually real.
The dev kit was listed on ASSEMblergames.com by user DaE with images they had taken. The kit was offered for $10,000, but was initially dismissed as a forgery. The shots depicted an anonymous-looking PC tower case, which was attached to an inexpensive display and was also running a Matrix-style datastream graphics over an unimpressive debug launcher.
Now, the obvious conclusion drawn by many was that it was a definite fake. However, Digital Foundry decided to dig deep into the issue and reached out to the source of the leak, and followed up the story with multiple developers working on next-gen projects. To everybody’s disbelief, apparently, these shots have now been tagged as the real deal.
What’s more, the source also has also stated that these kits were released to developers back in February this year, and featured NVidia cards and Intel CPUs. Now the dev kit is also rumored to have at least 8GB of memory. But other sources are suggesting as much as 12GB, as well as 64-bit architecture and DirectX 11 support.
The devkit itself is a strange looking black box, and is said by one next-gen developer to contain parts that have much in common with a modern "standard gaming PC". The shots depict a dashboard reminiscent of the current Xbox 360 test kit launcher, featuring a basic compiled program, dubbed "D3D11Game1" along with "NuiView" - which on 360, at least, is a simple tool for rendering camera views and data from an attached Kinect peripheral. No next-gen Kinect hardware photos have surfaced, as of now, but it is said to be considerably revised from the existing Xbox 360/PC peripheral.
But we believe that there’s more to come from this front. Stay tuned to find out more.
