QuakeCon 2004 – Day 2

Quakecon 2004 is in full effect and Bjorn3D is there to cover all the action. Take a look at our daily updates and see what’s happening at the event.

Quakecon Day 2

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Today we walked through the vender booth area, much smaller compared to previous years, highlighted by NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA has a large booth with many PCs for testing the latest games with the latest video cards including the 6800 and 6600. Needless to say the games look stunning and gameplay is incredible on titles like FarCry and Doom3. The AMD booth had their Ferrari laptops on display, which are powered by Athon 64s and ATI 9700s that bench as good as many desktops built with the top hardware of last summer. Also set up was a tent where we could play the beta version of the United Offensive expansion to Call of Duty. Next to that was the ABIT and Kingston area where the professional gamer Fatal1ty was taking challenges from players in Doom3, which attracted quite the crowd.

We also had the chance to sit down and talk with Bubba Wolford and Linda Kohout from the AMD gamer marketing team to hear what they are all about and ask some questions. Mainly we were told of all the advantages of 64-bit processing and how that will be applied to improve our games. AI was the biggest topic since it requires the most processing time because there are many choices to be made. Using 64-bit on AMD processors allows developers to give the computer players more choices while keeping the same performance. In massively mulitplayer games where the majority of the processing is done on the servers, larger worlds can be created because not only can the Opteron handle more data per clock than the 32-bit MP line it can also address more memory. The ability to provide this awesome performace on the both the client and server side is all part of AMD’s designed on, served on, played on strategy. We were also told that AMD is working closely with game developers to help them get the most out of their games with 64-bit. Look for some of your favorite current titles to have 64-bit versions released before Christmas this year and some as soon as October. Yup, games like FarCry will be bumped up to 64-bit splendor in just a couple of months. Along with their current projects AMD also informed us of the servers that they are using for the Quakecon tournaments and BYOC event. There are 12 dual Opteron servers running games for the Quakecon event. That’s some serious horsepower for this event.

Unfortunately this was one of the slower days for the Quakecon event so stay tuned as tomorrow we have a keynote speaker, updates from the tournament, and several workshops that we will be attending.