A visit to the E3 in Los Angeles

So guru's, today at the E3 we most certainly saw some pretty impressive stuff. The last time I visited the E3 was in 2003 and I gotta tell you ... it's way busier now in 2006. There where massive amounts of people at the exhibit. Always the booths are ridiculously expensive, the most impressive one had to be from EA in which a big 360 degrees large panorama screen was showing the latest stuff. I also had an exclusive opportunity to have  look at some new Unreal Tournament 2007 footage (yet was not allowed to take photo's) but hey, very extraordinary.

Can you say busy ?

Since the show is all about looking, listening and most of all experiencing it's really hard to sum all stuff up. I'll give it a go.

So NVIDIA had a pretty big booth showing the latest upcoming titles. The focus of course where the games being supported and not so much the hardware. One of the (for me) more important displays had to be the Havoc Physics engine. It's impressive to see this in real-time. For the guys and gals that do not know, obviously this is all about physics calculations done over the GPU.

Havoc Physics engine as displayed with the help of a second GPU.

Now I have some interesting news here. Since everybody figured this had to be done on the second GPU in some sort of SLI mode (and this similar expensive 2nd card), I have good news. It's very well possible that you can have for example a Geforce 7900 GTX as primary graphics cards and pair that one up with a GeForce 7600 GT to do the physics calculations ... now that's saving money for sure and it sure as hell is a way cheaper alternative compared to the 300 bucks Ageia solution.