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Gaming preview

Nothing to see here

By Will Greenwald
December 15, 2006

Welcome to the next generation. It's going to be pretty lonely here for a while.

The PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii have finally joined the Xbox 360 to form a triumvirate of next-gen gaming consoles. However, now that the three consoles are fast on their way to becoming old news, it's going to be quite some time before there's another big announcement. That means gaming fans looking for news out of CES 2007 will have to be content with a smattering of peripherals and accessories. PC gamers, on the other hand, may actually get a few worthwhile gems.

Much as they were last year, the games and gaming gear at CES will be sparse and esoteric. All of the major game and system developers are bypassing Vegas, keeping their their big news and demos lined up for the gaming shows later in 2007: the newly scaled-down E3 Media and Business Summit in July and IDG's consumer-focused GamePro Expo in October. Nintendo will be a no-show at CES, while Microsoft's and Sony's predictably large booths will be focused far more on those companies' nongaming assets--Windows Vista and the Blu-ray optical disc format, for instance--than on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The consoles will be there, certainly, but the emphasis will be on how they fit into the "digital home" strategies of their respective corporate masters.

Of course, third-party vendors--some of whom you've never heard of--will rush in to fill the void, with gaming peripherals being a primary attraction. Look for some new and potentially interesting gamepads and controllers that aren't due to hit stores until spring or summer. And, of course, there will also be gimmicky vinyl skins, foam-rubber steering wheels, and vibrating chairs, as well as gaming-centric displays and speakers.

On top of game console accessories, hardware companies such as AMD, ATI, Intel, and Nvidia will be showing off their latest tech. New multicore processors and even faster 3D accelerators will likely get more exposure at CES than any of the console offerings. For more on the PC hardware aspect of CES, read Rich Brown's PC preview.

Where are they now?
By Rich Brown

Nvidia GeForce Quad SLI

Read review

Modern dual-card 3D graphics might be a throwback to 3Dfx's old SLI capability, but Nvidia wowed us at last year's CES with its (at that point) never-been-done four-card Quad SLI set up. The initial clunky design was a visual monstrosity--and a power-usage nightmare--but we were excited by the idea that Quad SLI might let you play games smoothly at the highest available consumer resolutions. We never really expected that Quad SLI would take off as a mass-market product; the price and the setup looked like significant barriers even for most enthusiasts, let alone the casual gaming crowd. Still, we liked that Nvidia was pushing 3D gaming to its limit.

Over the course of the year, Quad SLI remained an ultraniche, ultraexpensive technology as we'd expected ($1,000 to $1,200 for the 3D cards alone), but Nvidia also refined the design to make setup a little easier. Thanks to the two-chip, single-slot GeForce 7950GX2 card, Quad SLI now requires only two PCI Express slots rather than four. Nvidia also eliminated the two external power cables and moved all of the power connections to the PC's main interior power supply.

As for the future of Quad SLI and its presence at this year's show, we don't think we'll see a four-card setup with Nvidia's most recent graphics chip, the GeForce 8800 GTX. For one thing, a single GeForce 8800 GTX card comes close to or even surpasses Quad SLI performance. The other reason is that pairing just two GeForce 8800 GTX cards can require a 1,000-watt PC power supply. We're not sure a power unit exists on the consumer market with enough juice to run four of them. If Nvidia can wrangle power consumption to more reasonable levels, it's possible that a new version of Quad SLI might resurface. It also wouldn't shock us if Nvidia came out with a consumer version of its external Quadro Plex 1000 workstation 3D processing array. Regardless of its future, Quad SLI was successful in demonstrating that 3D graphics technology can keep up with ever-larger displays and our growing expectations for 3D graphics quality. Whether you'll ever be able to afford it is another question.

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