AMD K6-2 Launch

Back in Atlanta we quickly registered and the next day we had fun trying to find AMD's press conference for the K6-2 launch. Half an hour late we managed to at least listen to the second half of Dana Krelle's speech and ask some questions. I guess it's all old news for you by now, the K6-2 will be 75% of the price of an Intel Pentium II at the same clock speed, the new 3Dfx/3DNow! driver for Quake2 should be available since K6-2 launch and there are a lot of games for 3DNow! supposed to be available pretty soon. I still hope that the K6-2 will be a great success, since it's certainly a great product, however the question of a reliable Super7-platform still stays unanswered to me. I'll work on that starting right now.

3Dfx - Voodoo Banshee

Next place to go to was of course 3Dfx. We had a nice presentation of Voodoo Banshee but pretty much all was under NDA. The only thing I want to say is that it will be an interesting product for the 2D/3D card market, it will not be Voodoo2 but it will certainly also not be another Voodoo Rush. I guess there's a lot more already on the web from others right now, but I maybe the first one to supply you with some hard testing data of the Voodoo Banshee very very soon.

Matrox - G200

After that we had trouble being on time at Matrox' booth. This time everything went perfect. Matrox must have placed someone at the booth with particularly good eye sight. I didn't even have to open my mouth and was already welcomed and asked to go inside. What a huge contrast to the disaster that happened at CeBIT, where my appointment crashed due to the inability of a front desk lady at doing her job right. The G200 will be out before the end of June in two flavors. As you certainly know already, there'll be a Mystique G200 and a Millennium G200, the first more focussed on gaming the second more focussed on high end professional use, but both with the same 3D features. I think that the G200 will be an interesting product due to it's pretty decent, although sub-Voodoo2, performance at a very high quality level. However, the G200 products will not exactly be cheap.

Videologic - PowerVR Second Generation

Unfortunately I couldn't make it to Videologic's booth, but they didn't take it too important themselves since I never received an invitation as well. Alex went there to find out that the whole project seems to be delayed. Alex was told that there was an actual .25 micron part available now, but he wasn't given any presentation. I don't know what the problems are Videologic is having, but they have to come out with PVRSG pretty soon if they want to make money with it. The competition is having some really scary products ready to go in a short while.

ThrustMaster - Upcoming New Quake Stick

Yeah, I can already hear all the Q2 players laugh about this. Who would ever play Quake 2 with a joystick ... ? Well, ThrustMaster came up with a new and kind of special idea. This new stick is held in both hands and you can move it the same way you want your player to move, including looking up and down. Many programmable buttons can make weapon change, waves, automated rocket jumps, or whatever else pretty easy to handle. If this product will be able replacing mouse and keyboard is questionable, but I think that courageous ideas like this are what the industry needs nowadays.

Thursday Evening - EIDOS Party, The Ultimate E3 Party ... ????

As a big fan of women like Lara Croft I couldn't help it but had to go to the EIDOS party. Everybody went crazy about this party beforehand and Alex was able to get tickets for us. So we both went there with high expectations in a nice limo. The next day I heard a radio commentator say "the EIDOS party was the ultimate E3 party" .... oh well, must be that Alex and I are both European, because we couldn't help but wonder what's great about a party where you have to cue up for at least 30 min. to get a little plastic cup full of a drink. This party may be fine for Americans, Europeans prefer to get drinks on time in a decent glass and a party like that would be ripped apart here in the old world. Sorry for those pathetic words, I love you too.
The cool thing about this party was that we hang out with Scott Sellers (3Dfx VP and heavy drinker too, in Alex' words "he's the man") and Kevin Schuh (NVIDIA, also the ' man' in my eyes, but suddenly disappeared), Brent "I'm sooo thirsty" Kerby and Lance Smith (both AMD) and a lot others before finally teaming up with the Gamers Extreme guys including Peter Kim (another 'the man') and Dennis Fong AKA Thresh, the big Quake hero, all buddies of mine. For Scott and me the frequency of getting drinks was definitely too low to reach any dangerous level (this is actually not valid for Brent and Alex, but they spent most of the time cueing for drinks), but we still had a great time. Thus the EIDOS party wasn't so bad after all.

Next Day, NVIDIA RIVA TNT - E3 Highlight No.2

After the K6-2 I wasn't expecting any other impressive products at E3, but the appointment with NVIDIA should prove me wrong. Instead of letting us sign another annoying NDA, NVIDIA didn't only show TNT, they even let me play a bit Quake2 at 1600x1200 resolution. Wow!! The chip ran only at 70 MHz, hence a lot less than the final 125+ MHz, but Quake2 ran pretty cool at this ultimate screen resolution. It maybe wasn't smooth enough for Thomas Pabst AKA [F3] T-Bone to play a DM, but I would estimate that it ran at about 15-18 fps. This would make a 27 to 32 fps at 125 MHz, maybe even more, so that I look forward to playing Q2 at 1280x1024 as soon as receiving a final TNT board. I'm a big believer into high resolutions in Quake2, since there's nothing nicer than sniping an opponent with the rail gun whilst he can't even see you. Currently I'm playing with two Voodoo2 boards at 1024x768 and the idea of playing Q2 at 1600x1200 simply blows my mind. The quality of Quake2 was outstanding as well. Are there any other games worth talking about? Well, Motorhead ran at 1280x1024 at outstanding quality as well. Why am I not talking of Unreal? NVIDIA didn't show it and the multiplayer abilities of Unreal aren't appealing to me as well, so that I still have to ask if there's anything else than Q2 really. Anyway, TNT rocks and I cannot see any other upcoming 3D graphic chip that would reach the TNT by any means at the current date.

S3 - Savage3D

We didn't really make it to S3's booth at E3, but we had the chance inspecting this product at Computex and I'd like to write about it here. S3 was running four Pentium II 400 systems, one with a i740, one with a NVIDIA RIVA128, one with a 3Dfx Voodoo2 and one with a S3 Savage3D 3D card next to each other. When I saw the systems they all ran Turok's TMark, the downloadable demo edition. The frame rate was supposed to show that Savage3D is faster than any other 3D card, including the Voodoo2. However I was pretty puzzled about the actual numbers the Voodoo2 system showed. You can certainly remember that I ran all CPUs with a single Voodoo2 card for comparison reasons in my AMD K6-2 article. The Pentium II 400 scored a TMark of 62.5 fps. The comparison system put up by S3 scored only 42.5 fps, a lot less than I would expect. The first thing I changed was disabling 'wait for vertical retrace' in the Voodoo2 driver. This should really be disabled because it increases performance without showing any visible disadvantage. Any gamer disables this feature anyhow, so enabling it is far from realistic. This improved the frame rate of the Voodoo2 system already, but it still didn't score the 62.5 fps. The Savage3D ran at about 55 fps, hence definitely slower than the Voodoo2 in case you run it properly. The difference was even bigger when running Forsaken on both systems. I wonder how S3 can say that the Savage3D is faster than Voodoo2 when using those methods of keeping the score of the Voodoo2 board at an unrealistically low level. As a matter of fact, Voodoo2 is definitely faster than what I saw of the Savage3D. I also talked to several OEMs, who didn't seem to be too impressed by the Savage3D as well, telling me about frequent system crashes of the Savage3D at in house presentations.
I am still waiting for a Savage3D evaluation card, but so far I was not that impressed by the Savage3D at all.

What Else?

We visited several game developers, discussing different topics, but it's not worth being mentioned here. On Saturday I flew over to San Francisco, of course not without the typical nightmare of domestic US air travel. United Airlines managed getting me to San Francisco with only 3 hours delay, making me unable to do the shopping I was supposed to do for Kate. Instead of this I could experience the ridiculous 'smoking launch' in Denver airport, where they are trying to rip of smoking flight guests by forcing them having drinks by some really lovely waiters 1 second after entering this cloudy place. I will do my best avoiding Denver airport in the future. That makes 'international hate airport' no. 2 for me already, after I awarded Miami airport as the most ridiculous airport world wide last year. In Miami I had to immigrate into the US for 10 min. So that I could get from terminal E to terminal F after coming from the Cayman Islands and trying to get to Frankfurt. Immigrating took no less than 1 h 10 min. and I was lucky that I had a stop over of two hours there. A security guy told me 'well, that's our system' - I wonder what he calls 'system', to me this is lack of organization and of course the careless American way of treating 'second class' people who aren't US citizens. Sorry, I'm 'only' European and I like it.

On Sunday I went ahead and flew United First Class from San Francisco to Taipei. Long distance flights with United aren't bad at all, whilst the seating can't compete with Lufthansa, the service is about two light years nicer. If Lufthansa would sack their air hostesses and employ the ones from United Airlines or if United could get the same seats as Lufthansa I would be a completely happy frequent flyer.

Taipei

I'm still taken by the magical impression Asia always has on me. I really love Asian culture and I can't help but being enchanted by the beauty of Asian women each time I get there. I was picked up by a good friend at Taipei International Airport and after picking up Alex (who did the same trip via London instead of San Francisco, the poor guy) we both checked into Taipei's Grand Hyatt hotel, the one that's luckily right next to the convention center. Taipei's Grand Hyatt is a perfect place in case you've got too much money, since the hotel is making a sport out of taking it out of your pocket at virtually any occasion . Don't ever try the room service, the food is highly overpriced, late, incomplete, the portions are tiny and the food is cold and when checking out don't be surprised when they charge you ridiculous prices. In my case they kept the high Computex rate even after Computex was over, something that Alex avoided by checking out for one day, then getting a rate of 40% less for a room identical to mine. The Grand Hyatt Taipei is certainly a nice place for a business trip (as long as you avoid the room service), but only in case your company pays for it. I would advise each CFO to look into the bills employees put in from the Taipei Grand Hyatt, they may be ridiculously overpriced. One thing is for sure, this hotel won't ever see me again and I can only advise you to do so as well. Taipei has definitely got better places than that.
Taipei is an amazing city. Not as busy and crowded as Hong Kong, but feeling much more real Chinese than the ex crown colony. The amount of Mercedes cars is lower than in Hong Kong as well, but still not much lower. Taxi driving in Taipei is only something for people who either drive like crazy themselves or who come from very urban areas like e.g. New York. Anyone else takes the serious risk of dying of a heart attack unless keeping his eyes closed. I know what many Californians say about 'Asian drivers'. They cannot mean drivers from Taipei, because those guys are excellent, especially the cab drivers. The climate in Taipei is semi-tropical, meaning air humidity close to 99% at a temperature of 30-34 degrees Celsius ('in the nineties'). Alex and I didn't have a problem with it except of permanently complaining about wet bums after sitting on a chair. There are some really great bars and clubs and you can have authentic Chinese food 24 hours a day.

Computex

The Computex show isn't as big as CeBIT or even Comdex Fall, but it's still a considerable size, growing every year. The exhibitors are found in two different buildings next to each other and some have got suites in the Grand Hyatt. It's not quite as zoo-like as CeBIT, Comdex or E3 for that matter, which makes this show rather enjoyable. I visited pretty much most of the important motherboard manufacturers and together with Alex I saw some Taiwanese graphics card manufacturers as well. Taiwan has a lot of heat sink and other cooling device manufacturers, which was interesting to see too. Unfortunately I haven't had the time visiting monitor or flat screen manufacturers although I'm planning to get into that topic soon. Computex is less about any particular news or highlights, it's about making or extending personal contacts and I'm pretty pleased with the result. The most interesting thing to find out was that there will be no motherboard manufacturer who will have a Pentium II Xeon (Slot 2) board ready at the launch date of the Xeon. Intel will be the only company to offer a Xeon platform at the end of June, Asus, AOpen, and Tyan are planning to have their product ready by the end of August. Many other motherboard manufacturers are not even planning a Slot 2 board yet. ALI and VIA were making a point showing how many motherboard manufacturers are using their Super7 chipset, but whilst ALI's Aladdin V chipset is now in revision 'F' and still not final, VIA's Apollo mVP3 is also still suffering from childhood diseases. Abit let me know that they are so displeased with both of those chipsets, that they rather won't produce any Super7 board at all. That sounds scary for AMD, but proves the concern I have for quite a while already. Chaintech was showing us their R&D and production facilities. They are particularly proud on a SUN system which simulates the motherboards after lay out. This can reduce time to market and is particularly helpful with the new high speed buses as 100 MHz and 133 MHz coming soon. For a complete motherboard simulation they still have to wait more than a day until the results are done.
As always, Computex is pretty much the only IT show I do really enjoy instead of becoming really fed up and exhausted. I'm planning a pretty big special about Taiwan and it's computer business, introducing this interesting country to the majority of you who don't even know where it is neither about its history and why so many IT companies are found there. I also made my mind up starting to learn Mandarin now.

Hua-Lien

One of my Taiwanese friends invited Alex and me for a weekend trip to the east coast of Taiwan. There is the vacation town Hua-Lien, situated right on the coast, with the mighty mountains in the background. Unfortunately the weather wasn't particularly great, but we still had a wonderful time, meeting with local people, having local food driving through the mountains and visiting ancient temples. The flight to Hua-Lien is not more than about $30 US, but due to bad weather we had to travel back by train. This was another interesting, although a bit scary experience. Two Europeans lost in Taiwan, unable to say any sentence in Mandarin and desperately trying to get back to Taipei.

Hong Kong

When I am in this corner of the world I always have to visit Hong Kong, one of my favorite towns on this globe. Alex had never been to Hong Kong, so that I planned showing him around to the Peak, Ocean Park, all the nice little beaches so many people don't know and of course to the night markets and clubs. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. We arrived in Hong Kong one day after a horrible flooding disaster that had cost the life of one courageous man who had successfully tried to rescue two teenagers from their sure death in the water. Nathan Road was not under water anymore, but there was no point in going to the Peak, Ocean Park or any other outdoor place. Of course the night markets weren't there as well, simply due to the rain. Thus Alex didn't really get a good impression of Hong Kong and I am looking forward to better weather next time I'm in Hong Kong, which may be in a couple of months again. My flight back was done with Lufthansa, managing an upgrade to First Class to experience the ridiculous behavior of Lufthansa air hostesses again. I wonder when Lufthansa will realize that having the best seats in First and Business Class is not enough and that first class passengers who are younger than 30 or 40 should be treated with the same respect as the zombies in business suits who usually fly in this class.

Summary

All in all you could say that the trip didn't really bring up that many news, however, those trips don't necessarily have to result in huge articles with big news. It seems pretty obvious that the next hot products will be 3Dfx' Voodoo Banshee and particularly NVIDIA's hot RIVA TNT, which doesn't have any officially known competitor so far. Let's hope that there will be a wide and reliable range of Super7 platforms for the K6-2 available soon, creating faith into this new CPU. I want to warn you making any too quick decisions generated by other publications, the Super7 platform is unfortunately not in a mature state yet. Slot 2 systems will be available soon, but this workstation and server platform won't be of interest to the vast majority of users out there, so don't lose your pants about this topic.
For me the trip was some kind of lesson about PC gaming shows, which aren't really my cup of tea. Too loud, too much hype, too little important news and too much blabla about nothing. Taiwan fascinated me again and this has affirmed my decision to dedicate some serious amount of time writing about this country and its IT industry. Tom's Hardware Guide was able to make some important contacts for its way into the 21st century, the multi-lingual idea is becoming reality very soon and the transition from a purely end user orientated media to a significant voice in the whole IT market has made another step forward as well. My vision of directing the IT market into a more fair and user friendly environment has again become more plastic.