QuakeCon 2005 Day Three Coverage

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Aug. 17, 2005

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The videos available for download in this article require the DivX codec. Download it here.

HardOCP Hardware Workshop, Continued...

AGEIA

There's been a lot of excitement surrounding this new company and their Physics Processing Unit (PPU) add-in card. They've been talking about how physics are the future of games and showing nifty demos of the capabilities of such a product, and they continued to do so at the hardware workshop. Today they showed us some more demos, and mentioned some cool possibilities for the use of their PPU: real-time smoke rendering (no more clipping floors, smoke that flows around objects), water that fills up containers, can leak out and spray realistically, and of course, blood squirting from necks onto walls and reacting to the environment realistically. Despite what many soccer-moms will likely tell you, blood is good. Mmmm blood.

AGEIA Boulders Demo - (1.53 MB)
AGEIA Airplane / Liquid Demos - (5.77 MB)

ATI

ATI didn't have much interesting to say, although they did mention that some time in September we'll see Crossfire and R520 - maybe, hopefully, there's a chance! In all seriousness, it sounds like it will actually happen, and in fact Anandtech has even posted an ATI roadmap for this fall.

AMD

AMD didn't have a whole lot to say as they weren't unveiling anything, so they pretty much just took questions from the audience. Before they did that, however, they mentioned the lawsuit between Intel/AMD and encouraged us all to go read the document on their website which is written in plain English. I should also mention that Kyle informed us Intel was invited to speak at the hardware workshop and they declined, two years in a row. I can't imagine why they would have declined to speak in a room full of hardcore gamers (cough cough). Official gaming CPU of Quakecon. Ha. Anyways!

When asked about Socket939 and when we will see a move to a new socket, the AMD guys answered that 939 will be around at least for another year and a half or so (which is a long time in this industry), and Kyle stepped in to mention that you should not hold out for the next thing to come along, because it's going to be a while - so if you want to upgrade now, do it. One audience member asked why Intel is faster at video encoding and when AMD will catch up, cueing the entire room to laugh at him. The answer he received is that if he had done any research and seen some benchmarks, he would know that "[AMD's] slowest dual core kicks [Intel's] ass."

Another question was regarding the 4000+ being essentially identical to the FX-53 to which AMD replied that the FX-53 WAS top-of-the-line when it was introduced, and the 4000+ didn't come until much, much later. He went on to explain that the FX-series is special in that the highest-end FX CPU will always be their fastest CPU, not to mention that the FSB is unlocked on all FX CPUs. It was also noted that the FX-53 is no longer in production. Someone then asked about a possible dual core FX processor, and AMD said that certainly this will happen eventually, but currently single core makes more sense for a pure gaming CPU.

The last question (that I can recall) was regarding DDR2 support. Basically, they answered by saying that DDR2 was introduced with reduced performance in comparison to DDR (and we will see the same trend with DDR3 compared to DDR2 when it comes along) and that they are waiting for DDR2 to mature and actually yield some performance benefit before adopting the technology. They don't intend to support DDR2 just for the sake of supporting a new technology. However, as soon as AMD sees that there is a performance benefit with DDR2, they will most definitely support it.

Closing Thoughts

This was our first year attending QuakeCon, and overall I think it went pretty well. Sure, the first day, particularly NVIDIA's special presentation, was disappointing, but that was really my fault for not leaving (Brian wanted to, haha - sorry Brian). The second day was awesome as we were the first to see footage from the DOOM movie and got a chance to hear the creative minds behind the flick talk about it - it looks like it will be pretty good too. Then to top it off, we had the opportunity to hear John Carmack speak for about an hour and a half, which was very interesting.

Our third and last day at QuakeCon 2005 also went well, though not terribly exciting. We got to witness the unveiling of some promising new products from Logitech, watched some very cool demos from AGEIA, heard that R520 should be here in September (cross your fingers), and it was cool to hear what the AMD guys had to say.

Oh, and I can't forget the fun we had on the 5-hour drive each way, and at Dallas SpeedZone where I kicked Brian's arse in every race and even putt-putt (Brian's Note: Hey, I gotta let you win once in a while!). Last but not least, we stopped at the Czech Stop to get some oh-so-yummy kolaches on the drive home. Mmmm kolaches. See ya next year, QuakeCon.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: HardOCP Hardware Workshop
Page 3: HardOCP Hardware Workshop, Continued... / Closing Thoughts

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QuakeCon 2005 August 13, 2005

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QuakeCon 2005 August 11, 2005

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by Guest on August 18, 2005 - 12:14 am

the links to the movies don't work...

2 - Posted by Guest on August 18, 2005 - 12:18 am

links to ALLLL of the movies don't work... come on.... chop chop.. i demand teh movies! working links is usually a good thing to check

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