FPSLabs : E3: Hardware Day 1

Our first glimpse of Conroe, early PhysX impressions, and one of the coolest things we’ve ever worn on our head. All of these describe our experiences on the first day of E3 – and it’s only going to get better.

From checking out the latest offerings in Fata1ty’s line of products to getting screwed out of a free Quake 4 game at the Intel booth, day one of E3 was packed full of interesting events.

It just so happened that one of the first hardware booths we came across was Ageia’s. They had on display dozens of really fast Dell XPS systems equipped the PhysX add-in card. We took our turn on “Cell Factor” and “Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport” and were pretty surprised with what we saw. Sure, the shear magnitude of physics calculations that were necessary when playing these games was absolutely amazing, but the fluid effects are what really caught our eye. Whenever someone got shot in either of these games, the blood looked extremely… fake. The red spray-like effect generated in a game like Counter-Strike Source seems far more realistic than the mass of red blobs that spew from people’s abdomens when you frag them. In “Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport”, while I didn’t really know what I was doing, I managed to utilize the flame thrower to scorch some enemies. The flame itself seemed nothing more than a stream of orange fluid that bounced off of walls and such. It honestly seemed nothing more than a primitive particle system with a little bit of fancy rendering techniques. It should be noted that because the PhysX card has very little support as of now, the effects aren’t really expected to be fully developed.**

Aside from that little hiccup at the Ageia booth, every single thing we saw on day 1 was absolutely amazing. At the Intel booth, there was a circle of laptops around a DJ that were running Quake 4. These laptops featured Intel Pentium-M 770 processors with Intel 915M onboard graphics. I have to say that I was extremely impressed by the image quality and overall performance that the integrated graphics in the laptops provided. It was very uncommon that I noticed any sort of skipping in the game, and details were set pretty high as well. In addition to these laptops, Intel also had some more powerful laptops and some really fast Dell XPS systems playing various games. They held a Quake 4 tournament at the booth, and your Hardware Editor In Chief would have won had not he been forced to switch computers before the final round.

Easily the coolest booth at E3 so far is Fatal1ty’s. Not only does Mr. Wendel have his shootout setup in all of it’s glory, he also has kiosks from all of the hardware manufacturers that make his branded gear. That means that Abit, Zalman, Creative, and the recently signed XFX were all there showing their stuff. One thing that I found extremely interesting about this was Abit’s demonstration of its Fatal1ty AN8 motherboard. The uGuru setup on the display system was absolutely amazing; I had never had a chance to see it before today. The AMD Athlon64 3200+ Venice processor plugged in to the motherboard was set to different clock speeds and those clock speeds were set to different presets. Then you could toggle those presets via the uGuru software OR the uGuru faceplate. These can also be set to change automatically upon application launch. Pretty cool stuff. Also, Stuart Grubbs and Thomas Gribble plan to go head to head against Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel on day two, so watch out.

**Fluid appearences in Cell Factor and Blood Sport are the direct result of the game developer, not Ageia.
{mospagebreak heading=PhysX, Abit, Creative, Fatal1ty&title=eMagin, Ideazon, CONROE!}
The next really cool thing we saw was over at the eMagin, where Joseph Runde showed us his virtual reality headset. Now, virtual reality headsets are nothing new. I remember going to the mall back in the day and seeing kids wearing huge clunky head gear while surrounded by some kind of ring thing. With this eMagin headset, those days are long gone. The headset itself is a very lightweight device that fits surprisingly comfortably on your head. The display itself is generated from two OLED displays within the brains of the device. Also included in the device are three gyroscopes that allow motion to be picked up. Beyond the display part, the headset is also equipped with a built-in earphone feature. These earphones can be detached completely from the headset to allow for third party audio devices to be attached. The headset also comes with a built-in microphone. As hardware enthusiasts, and more importantly as gamers, we gave this product the full critique, but we could not think of one thing that they seem to have missed in the research and design.

In the same area as the eMagin booth was the Saitek booth, where they had some new mouses on display as well as a very interesting looking gamepad device. Although we weren’t able to get our hands on either to test on an actual game, they looked really cool and seem to have taken some of the design suggestions we made in our mouse review article into contention.

When we came across the Ideazon booth at E3 we were expecting the same old Merc/Zboard combination. Not only were we totally wrong, but they also had some very interesting news to share with us that we can’t reveal just yet. One thing they did have, however, was the Fang. The Fang is a brand new product from Ideazon that they actually developed for military use. After the military was done training with it, they did a very small redesign, renamed it, and marketed it as the “Fang” game pad. Using the Fang seemed to require a bit of a learning curve, but the buttons are definitely laid out quite well and playing on it was quite fun. And with our departure from Ideazon came the end of the day 1 E3 exhibition – on to the parties.

Turns out GGL had a party going on after day 1 of E3, where they hosted the Vsports Allstar game between Europe and the Americas. Being GotFrag, of course we were invited. We had settled in to a nice drink and dinner while watching the Allstar game when we noticed something interesting about the computers; turns out that all 10 tournament computers were running Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Upon closer inspection we also noticed that they utilized NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX video cards. After these discoveries, we were totally dying to get our grubby hands on one of these systems after the match – and that’s exactly what we ended up doing. We swooped on Michael “method” So’s computer after the match in exchange for letting him borrow our camera to take a picture of himself standing next to Leeroy Jenkins (yes, Leeroy himself was there), and started to have at it. A quick check of the system details revealed that each computer was sporting 3.25GB of RAM, a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.66GHz, and a GeForce 7800GTX. We ran some benchmarks on it to get an idea of the performance even though we weren’t really supposed to, and we got some amazing results. One of the benchmarks we ran was SuperPI 1M, and though we cant technically tell you what the processor actually scored, we can tell you it was below 20 seconds. The system also was able to crank out 999FPS in Counter-Strike 1.6 (not that that matters) under developer 1, and achieved well over 400FPS right in the thicket of 2 smoke grenades. The results we achieved on the rest of our benchmarks were nothing short of spectacular, and we will report those scores to you on Friday, when we get a real good chance to run our full benchmark suite (fun!). Our overall impression of Core 2 Duo so far is that it is the fastest thing we have ever used, and we cant wait to get our hands on one for a full-blown review.

Be sure to check out our E3 picture gallery!

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