You know, this Comdex is great. Sure, there are not that many people around. We think it has to be less than 100k, which is less than half of last year. But, who knows? Comdex attendance data always seemed inflated in the past. This year, though, it's actually not bad to be here. You get to talk to people. You get to see stuff. No one looks too harried or haggard.

And, there are scantily clad servers waiting on you at every slot machine as you ponder your Comdex article deadlines and feed the one armed bandit your rent check. It's a sort of bliss.

Nvidia Power Breakfast

We started off day one of Comdex with a power breakfast courtesy of Nvidia and the new NV17M. A better introduction for this might be: "How now to make friends with the media on the first day of Comdex!" We, the hungry press, were on time for our power breakfast, but Nvidia wasn't. Never leave a pack of hungry tech journalists waiting too long. There was already a long line of media waiting to get in to eat breakfast, and the ensuing rush when the doors of the meeting room opened up onto the buffet was to be our only confrontation with a crowd at this year's Comdex.

Who doesn't want a free breakfast on the first day of Comdex, but, is it really in your best interest to leave a bunch of hungry media folks standing outside your meeting room for almost 30 minutes, waiting to eat? Survey says, NO! However, this is what happened. It looked like some sort of an angry herd of zombies, waiting to eat in some form of disorganized chaos.

As we already told you in our Day 0 report from Comdex , Nvidia was keen to make sure that we knew that the new NV17M was the laptop technology of the future. Now, with over 90 million Nvidia based graphics cards shipped and closing in on 100 million by year's end, the NV17M reprsents a new level of 3D graphics for the mobile platform. Being one of the world's single biggest semiconductor companies is a fact not lost on Nvidia.

Nvidia is betting its reputation on the new technology of this chip. In some ways, it sounds like nothing more than an advanced mobile GeForce 3, but, in fact, the NV17M includes the features found in the GeForce 3 chips and more, adding a few new wrinkles in order to make things interesting. With Nvidia's goal of being able to run everything at 1024x768 with a playback rate of 60fps, it is as fast as any GeForce card that shipped a year ago. Nvidia could not be pinned down when asked how much it will add to the cost of the average notebook. You should expect to see it in a notebook from Toshiba toward the end of February, 2002.

ATI, Too

Lest it be forgotten, Nvidia isn't without competition. ATI is doing its best to regain its reputation with its drivers for the Radeon series cards. New driver features which have been in development for some time will add ATI's own "Smooth Vision" enabled to the feature set. It will feature user-selectable performance and quality modes, with ten different performance combinations. ATI promises that they are hard at work on driver development, with over 400 of their staff involved in that effort. ATI also told us that we can expect regular driver refreshes on a quarterly basis, as well as better access to beta drivers. The also went out on a possible limb by telling us the following: "In future driver development we can expect the focus to no longer be on driving up the frame rate where it doesn't effect the game play." In addition, [ATI] stated that they are still committed to driver optimizations that will enhance the performance of Quake-based games, or games that use any of the Quake engines.

ATI also announced the Mobility FIRE GL 7800 mobile GPU for MCAD and digital content creation, as well as other 3D applications. While the Mobility is based on the Radeon technology in order to increase the Fire GL 7800's performance, it also includes a high performance and optimized OpenGL driver. The Mobility Fire GL will support 128bit DDR memory and Hyper Z technology to boost memory performance. With these new and advanced features, we can expect to see many of the desktop replacement notebooks becoming available with the new Mobility Fire GL 7800.

Belkin

A visit with with the folks from Belkin revealed that they are continuing with their strategy of releasing new and agressively priced networking products. Belkin now has a complete line of 802.11b wireless networking products available, which looked quite good. Although, at this time, Belkin has no plans to enter the new 802.11a market, you never know, that could always change. Right now they are happy to continue to focus on the 802.11b technology. Also of intrest from Belkin were their new rack mount KVM products.