how to make kinect upload depthdata short[] as int short texture formats in shader model 3.0?

how to make kinect upload depthdata short[] as int short texture formats
in shader model 3.0?

hi there we are working on a project with Kinect and C# XNA on Windows7.
so we ran into an unexpected problem. the depth data from the kinect
camera gives us an a Short[] but we can only create texture in either
int32 formats or float16 or float32 or float64 formats.
so the problem is converting this fairly large short[] image into a int32
or float on the cpu is ridiculously slow. and there's no bitwize operation
on shadermodel 3.0 so we can't bithack the float back to an int as far as
I've understood it.
were thinking about moving into c++ now but this makes us wonder. how the
hell does xbox360 work with kinect. it should be optimized for xbox we
think? seems silly that there's so few available texture formats.