E3 Day 2:
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I spent most of today looking into the things I missed yesterday and doing other research. I didn't make it back to the 3Dfx booth - but I spent way too much time there yesterday anyway. I did however see and learn about much of the competition:
S3 -
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The had a meeting room above the conference floor that was setup like an office - very classy, relatively low-key. The staff was courteous and helpful. The room had about 10 computers running various games on their Savage3D cards.
I spent about 10 minutes _closely_ watching "Foresaken" running on one machine. For the most part, the image was very crisp and clear. I think the lighting effects weren't quite as over-the-top (obnoxious?) as on my V2 SLI setup at home - HOWEVER - the FPS rate (displayed at the top) varied TREMENDOUSLY from as high as 70fps to a low of 15fps with it averaging roughly 35fps. The framerate dropped substantally whenever the bike entered a new room or when lots of enemy bikes appeared on the screen. I'd say that you'd be at a big disadvantage in multiplayer furballs if you used the machine I tested.
I then watched as one of the staffers ran the TIMEDEMO benchmark on Quake2. The reported FPS from that was 30.2 fps - much lower than the 70 fps I get on my machine. The lack of multitexturing support really showed.
To be fair, the S3 is supposed to come out at a much cheaper price point than the ~$500 I paid for my SLI setup.
Matrox -
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They also showed "Forsaken" running on their G200. I watched closely for at least 10 minutes. They wouldn't let me actually use the game and they didn't have the FPS display showing BUT they had similar _obvious_ framerate problems when entering large rooms with many enemies. The frame would actually "break" in mid redraw. Very noticeable and probably unacceptable to real gamers.
nVIDIA -
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They booth was closed to the public. It was among a large area of "office-like" booths on the floor of the East hall which all had opaque walls and locked doors. TDFX also had a room near the nVIDIA room - no signs of life though.
PowerVRSG -
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I already mentioned how useless their booth was (too loud, huge projection TVs distorting the image quality, no people to talk to). However, I did go back and look carefully at both "Unreal" and "Daikatana" running on PowerVRSG cards in other vendors' areas. "Unreal" looks good, but there are several special effects (rippling water, clouds, reflections) that have noticeable problems right now. They have the appearance of driver bugs to me though. I watched "Daikatana" (based on the Quake2 engine) closely for 20 minutes running side-by-side with a Voodoo2 setup and couldn't discern _any_ differences.
I didn't see any other booths that were not using Voodoo2 cards for their demos beyond the ones that I reported yesterday. Probably saw at least 20 more booths that were using Voodoo2 cards in their demo machines.
Finally, I missed the "Forsaken" girl by 5 minutes ;-( When you think about it, her fame from this is absolutely amazing - I mean she's not even a part of the game for crying out loud! Unbelieveable. I am definitely E3'd out and ready to head home.
I gotta eat now. I'll post my thoughts on the great(!) new software I saw later tonight.
Chip |
