From checking out the latest offerings in Fata1ty’s line of products to getting screwed out of a free Quake 4 game at the Intel booth, day one of E3 was packed full of interesting events.

It just so happened that one of the first hardware booths we came across was Ageia’s. They had on display dozens of really fast Dell XPS systems equipped the PhysX add-in card. We took our turn on “Cell Factor” and “Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport” and were pretty surprised with what we saw. Sure, the shear magnitude of physics calculations that were necessary when playing these games was absolutely amazing, but the fluid effects are what really caught our eye. Whenever someone got shot in either of these games, the blood looked extremely… fake. The red spray-like effect generated in a game like Counter-Strike Source seems far more realistic than the mass of red blobs that spew from people’s abdomens when you frag them. In “Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport”, while I didn’t really know what I was doing, I managed to utilize the flame thrower to scorch some enemies. The flame itself seemed nothing more than a stream of orange fluid that bounced off of walls and such. It honestly seemed nothing more than a primitive particle system with a little bit of fancy rendering techniques. It should be noted that because the PhysX card has very little support as of now, the effects aren’t really expected to be fully developed.**

Aside from that little hiccup at the Ageia booth, every single thing we saw on day 1 was absolutely amazing. At the Intel booth, there was a circle of laptops around a DJ that were running Quake 4. These laptops featured Intel Pentium-M 770 processors with Intel 915M onboard graphics. I have to say that I was extremely impressed by the image quality and overall performance that the integrated graphics in the laptops provided. It was very uncommon that I noticed any sort of skipping in the game, and details were set pretty high as well. In addition to these laptops, Intel also had some more powerful laptops and some really fast Dell XPS systems playing various games. They held a Quake 4 tournament at the booth, and your Hardware Editor In Chief would have won had not he been forced to switch computers before the final round.

Easily the coolest booth at E3 so far is Fatal1ty’s. Not only does Mr. Wendel have his shootout setup in all of it’s glory, he also has kiosks from all of the hardware manufacturers that make his branded gear. That means that Abit, Zalman, Creative, and the recently signed XFX were all there showing their stuff. One thing that I found extremely interesting about this was Abit’s demonstration of its Fatal1ty AN8 motherboard. The uGuru setup on the display system was absolutely amazing; I had never had a chance to see it before today. The AMD Athlon64 3200+ Venice processor plugged in to the motherboard was set to different clock speeds and those clock speeds were set to different presets. Then you could toggle those presets via the uGuru software OR the uGuru faceplate. These can also be set to change automatically upon application launch. Pretty cool stuff. Also, Stuart Grubbs and Thomas Gribble plan to go head to head against Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel on day two, so watch out.

**Fluid appearences in Cell Factor and Blood Sport are the direct result of the game developer, not Ageia.