WinHEC Coverage

WinHEC does not get the coverage as many other industry trade shows in the gaming circles and probably for a good reason. The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference is not the most game/hardware industry friendly sounding sort of event. WinHEC 2004 took place in sunny Seattle (yes, that's right it was sunny in Seattle. Not so good further North) at the Trade and Convention Center just on Pike Street. Due to a late night because of a certain launch the previous evening, I managed to arrive just after the keynotes from names that should be familiar, ATI's CEO Dave Orton and Bill Gates- which I was thoroughly chastised for. The WinHEC exhibition hall was quite small consisting of only a single pavilion and was not nearly the same scope as Comdex or any of the larger shows. However there were a couple things that will be of interest including a look at VIA and S3's set top box as well as the graphical requirements for the GUI of Microsoft's upcoming OS, Longhorn.

The Exhibition Halls

The Exhibition Hall was fairly quiet with most of the major players having a fairly muted booth. ATI and AMD had the larger presences while Nvidia had a fairly small booth. ATI of course showed off the X800 series of products having just launched just that morning with demos of Double Cross featuring Ruby as well as a demo of Serious Sam 2 showing the differences between a 3Dc enhanced model and plain jane one. Also showcased was ATI's excellent multimedia software suite.

ATi's Multimedia Software in action. The audience is transfixed by lack of a forecheck by the Leafs.

Nvidia had a pretty muted presence also. A big screen was running a demo of Nalu and another was running Need For Speed: Underground - in 3D. One of the features that has not been extensively covered in the reviews of the 6800 is the ability of the Forceware 60 drivers that enables the use of 3D glasses to make games 'pop' out of the screen kind of like in the days of the original Nintendo with Rad Racer and like the name of the ride at Disneyland that eludes me at the moment. The glasses are not of the red and blue variety as seen in Back to the Future but look just like polarized lenses. There were the LCD shutter glass variant from a few years back also but this is much simplified. The effect is quite good and I think a lot of gamers will be surprised at this. Speaking to Nvidia at Editor's Day about a month back, game support is very wide spread.

3D Glasses. Even with the lack of red and blue lenses they are not a fashion statement and should be used only in the privacy of your home.