After two long days at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, it was finally time to get down to some purely hardware work. The third day at E3 was compromised of important meetings with Ageia and Intel.

Upon arriving at the Ageia booth, we met up with a nice gentleman named Peter Evers who took the time to explain to us the technology behind the PhysX card. He also gave us some insight about Ageia’s outlook on the future of the gaming market and how physics processing ties into it. We also asked him directly about the primitive looking effects we noticed on the first day when we had a go at some of the PhysX enabled games. It turns out that the visual aspect of both the blood in ‘Cell Factor’ and the “Flame thrower”, which I now know to be a napalm blaster, in ‘Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport’ were solely the result of the developer. What this meant is that my comments about the PhysX from my first experience with it were pretty much unfounded. Therefore, I retract my previous statement about this issue. He also explained to us that the real advantage of the PhysX technology is the free SDK that developers can use to optimize their games for use with the physics accelerator. But perhaps the most amazing thing about the PhysX processor was revealed when he gave us a short demo of ‘Cell Factor’. He took aim toward a large suspended banner and fired away. When bullets hit the banner, not only did it react as you would expect it would via the rippling effect, it also tore apart as you would expect from a bullet hitting a cloth. Cloth then started burning and falling to the ground, realistically. This type of effect has never even come close to being achieved before, and we believe that it is the most impressive ability of the PhysX card.

After bidding farewell to Mr. Evers and sending our apologies to the Ageia people for the misunderstanding that had occurred two days before, we took off toward what we were looking forward to the most; our chance to fully experience the power of Conroe.

When we arrived at the Intel meeting room in 501b with our benchmarking suite on a flash drive, we had big expectations. However, upon having a conversation with a couple of the Intel representatives about our previous escapades at the GGL VSports All-Star game and our intentions to finish the benchmarking process, they seemed eager to let us, but they wanted to have their press representatives and some of their technology team present. Unfortunately, they were unable to gather this team, but promised we would get our chance in the next couple of weeks. Dissapointed, I checked out the rest of the things they had on display in the meeting room.