Next up was a visit to the Nvidia booth where I got to check out their new line of mobile video products. In this case I don’t mean their laptop video cards (more on that in a bit) but rather the mobile video that goes into cell phones. I hadn’t realized this in the past but nVidia has been cranking out cell phone chips for the last three years. Today they were showin off their latest chip the GoForce 5500 a new chip that is just about to go into production. The demo they showed today showed Quake 3 running on the chip at 1024 X 768 at around 30-40 FPS which is impressive given that the chip generates almost no heat and only consumes about 150 milliwats of power. What’s interesting about the chip is how the mobile engineers have to work to keep that power usage down and they do something similar to what Chrysler and GM do with their new V8 engines. When you are cruising on the highway and don’t need all the power of the engine, they shut down have the valves to get better fuel performance. The nVidia chip works the same way except that they shut down graphics pipelines and other on chip processes to save engery.
After looking at the small end of their line it was time to check out the new Quad SLI desktop setup and the new SLI laptop from Alienware. Currently nVidia is only selling the Quad SLI technology to OEM so they can make sure the boards are setup correctly as you need to have the right bios settings and drivers versions to get peek performance out of the cards. The nvidia rep admitted that the Quad SLI solution really didn’t have a lot of mainstream use right now as you need a giant display and dual monitors to really get anything out of it but that there were certainly hard core users out there who had the money and the need to purchase such equipment.
The new SLI laptop from Alienware isn’t something that you are necessarily going to be busting out on cross country business trips to get in a few games of Battlefield 2. For one reason the laptops are heavy and the second reason is that they consume power like Sean chugs down Mountain Dew. The laptops are really meant for hard core LAN parties so you have everything in one combined unit and don’t have to deal with lugging a CRT and tower around with you. Alienware will be releasing n 17”, 19,” and 20” versions.of the unit.
Two-Worlds from Topwave was next on the list. I was intrigued by the title earlier this year when they released their first set of drop dead gorgeous screenshots. Unfortunately the game still wasn’t in a playable state but they did have some information on what could make this the next big RPG. The game has a new deck card like magic system that allows you to morph and stack your spells as you go through the game. This helps prevent spell obsolescence as you can always enhance the spells you start with to make them more powerful. The developers of the game are still slaving away at the game but Topwave expects the game to make it’s debut on the Xbox 360 and the PC by the time next year’s E3 rolls around.
My final appointment of the day was with MMO developer CCP to check out their game EVE Online. Going in I knew a little about EVE Online and I had been meaning to take advantage of the 14 day free trial but with my current queue of overdue game reviews adding a MMORPG to that list was not something that I could do and look at myself in the mirror. That said my meeting with the CCP folks has given me some new inspiration to crank on some reviews so that I can start playing the game and have a clear conscience.
For those of you not familiar with the game, EVE Online is a space exploration/combat MMO. You work your way up the food chain by trading, killing, or running errands for the various organizations in the game. The first thing that hits you about the game is the scope and breadth of the game. The universe is simply huge and rather than having the game spread out across several shards the game actually takes place on one shared instance.
What I really liked about the game is how they handle skill advancement. Instead of having a leveling system that is based on skill points and experience you have to actually spend “real world” time to learn a new skill. This makes it so that casual players aren’t going to be at the mercy of the power leveler time person who can spend 10-20 hours a day on the game vs the causal game who might only be able to put in 10-20 hours a month on the game. The hard core gamers will have more money in the game but they will not have a strong skill level advantage over the other games.
CCP is going to be releasing a new enhancement patch to the game soon that will provide a major graphical overhaul to all of the ship models in the game as well as adding some new ships, new systems and some new features and should be out in a few months.
I could go on and on about all of the cool features in the game like how all the things in the world are built from a limited supply of blue prints, the amazing player generated content in the game, the intriguing economic system, or the most awesome quarterly magazine that the game puts out. I’m just going to say that if you are a MMO fan or a space game fan you owe it to yourself to check out the game.
That’s it for Thursday. I did get a chance to meet with some of the developers over at NC Soft after the show today but I’m going to wrap that coverage in with my coverage of the booth tour tomorrow so check back then.
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