In between furiously posting the latest game information, we had the time to shoot the breeze with a PR representative from a third-party company. The conversation drifted toward the framerate issues that we've seen while previewing a few Xbox 360 titles. There is no doubt that the level of detail in the trailers is up to next-gen standards, but almost anything in-engine has chugged a bit at one point or another.

When asked about this issue our source replied that the current playable 360 games would all have framerate issues due to the fact that they are running on alpha test units. A rough estimate placed these machines at about one-third as powerful as the 360. We went head-to-head in Top Spin 2 and noticed that there were visible jaggies and a few frame drops. This is because the Alpha units do not run anti-aliasing and simply don't have the power to run a high-res game at full quality. The developers had tuned Top Spin 2 to run at a smooth 60 frames per second but this was simply not possible on the Alpha hardware. Official sources place the final development kit dates for July and the results promise to look much better.

It is not surprising that many games in early stages would suffer from the types of issues we've seen so far. Since the alpha units are underpowered, it is surprising that Microsoft hadn't touted this fact earlier. Knowing that the final products will most definitely run smoother certainly got us more excited about the 360 line-up.