Once again, we sallied forth into the blustery desert and land of casinos for our yearly pilgrimage to geek heaven, Comdex. For those who may not be familiar, Comdex at Las Vegas lays claim to being the largest computer trade-show in the world. True or not, the fact is that it takes up not one, but two whole convention centers. Each year we try to see everything in one whirlwind of a day and each year we fail. Regardless, there's always something new to learn.

There's hardly anything of direct interest to gamers at the show, but there is always new hardware to preview months before anything hits the stores. The first place we scored some good information was at ATI.

ATI's bread and butter has come from selling boards packed with more features than outright performance to OEM's, so they've never been much of a choice for hardcore gamers. Interestingly enough, that just may change in the next few months.

The Rage Magnum and Rage Fury are a couple hot cards based on the ATI Rage 128 chipset. Featuring full OpenGL ICD support, AGP2X, superscalar rendering (a fancy way to say single pass multitexturing), hardware DVD decoding, 32-bit rendering, (in the case of the Rage Fury) TV-Out/ATI-TV support, and 3D resolutions up to 1920x1200.

How does it translate to games? From what we could see at the show, it worked quite well. Running mostly on Quake-engine shooters and other action games, the Rage 128 looked very impressive. My subjective impression was that it was significantly faster than the TNT or Voodoo2 - probably akin to a Voodoo2 SLI setup. Judging by the card's strengths and the type of games shown on display, I would hazard a guess that the sims that would benefit the most from the Rage 128 would probably be those that use the most amount of alpha-blending. The alpha-happy Jane's WW2 Fighters springs to mind as a likely candidate at the moment.

Our stop at the Canopus booth was quite a shock. The only boards on display were all video-editing products. After some discussion, it was clear that Canopus has changed course and set sail for more familiar waters. The company has always made premium products at a premium price. This strategy worked wonderfully for them with the original Pure3D and its exclusive feature of extra texture memory.

However, with the Voodoo2-based products, the competition was close enough that price and availability became more of a factor, tipping the hand to larger companies like STB, Diamond and Creative. The result? Canopus fans are advised to do their Christmas shopping early, because all 3dfx-based products have been discontinued. The characteristic phrase we heard over and over was "We will not make another 'Me, too!' board again." Will there be a Voodoo3 product? Maybe. No decision has yet been made, but nothing is definite at this time.

There is a very interesting twist to the story, though. Canopus is working exclusively with a new startup company that is developing a new type of 3D chipset domestically. If the prototypes are successful, the company promises a new board with "revolutionary" technology and performance.

When pressed, our rep was somewhat evasive, but we have learned that this product will be sufficiently different from established 3D chipsets that it will be difficult to compare on a feature-for-feature basis, but nevertheless should offer performance well into a class of its own. We'll refrain from speculating about this "mystery company", but it does make for an interesting "dark horse" in the 3D accelerator competition.

Continuing on our tour, we couldn't help but notice that the translucent blue and clear styling motifs from the iMac were *everywhere*. Everything from CD caddies, Palm Pilot cases, even surge suppressors were assimilated into the Apple design school. Resistance is futile. Taste is irrelevant. Like a sailor caught in a siren song, I felt so caught up in the spirit of the collective that I nearly bought an iMac-style USB hub right there. Fortunately the salesdrone didn't speak any English. Lucky break for this Argonaut!

On to Voyetra Turtle Beach, where I was treated to a demonstration of the Montego 2. Personally, I've never really understood the hype on 3D sound. I have tried several flavors of positional sound with two speakers and simply couldn't see the point or advantage. With the true "four on the floor" four-speaker demonstration using the Montego 2, positional sound made a heck of a lot more sense. Now I really could pinpoint the direction of a sound effect with astounding clarity.

With 96 simultaneously hardware-accelerated voices, true quadraphonic surround-sound, noise-resistant circuitry, and support for both conventional and digital joysticks, I think the most important question sim fans can ask isn't "when and how much?" but "how soon can sim developers fully support it?"

Click to continue . . .

Next stop, 3Dfx. By now you've probably heard more about the Voodoo3 than you can shake a stick at. I'll skip the basics and get right down to the good stuff. Essentially, what we know as the Voodoo3 today was originally known internally as the Banshee2. With that basic piece of the puzzle in mind, a lot of other things should begin to make sense.

Overall, performance is good, but really nothing Earth-shattering. The Voodoo3 runs significantly faster than a Voodoo2 SLI setup, supports superscalar rendering, and is scheduled for a 2Q99 release. It does run pretty well, and does seem to support some nice texturing, but it really seems to be a more significant invention for OEM sales and new users than hardcore gamers that may already be running SLI Voodoo2 cards.

A side trip took us to check out NEC. As luck would have it, they had a Sega Dreamcast on display there. Dreamcast is significant in the fact that it uses technology from the Power VR Second Generation chipset. The overall system performance was astounding, very comparable or perhaps even better than a high-zoot gaming PC. Strangely enough, a glance at a PC running a sample PVRSG board revealed good but really uninspiring performance.

There is definitely some kind of specialized hardware in Dreamcast that the PC boards lack, but whether it's a fancy floating-point processor or just the advantage of not having to deal with a bloated operating system is hard to say. Alas, while Dreamcast will arrive in Japan just about any day now (if it hasn't already) , North Americans will have to wait a full year before seeing any domestic models.

The last game-related vendor we checked out was Hercules. There we saw the Savage3D-based Terminator Beast up close and personal. It's performance was really a mixed bag, and unfortunately does not lend itself well to comparison. Two demos were running on it that used extremely large textures that would have brought the typical 3D accelerator to its knees. This is possible using S3's proprietary texture-compression technology.

Nevertheless they poked along at a measly 10 frames a second or so. No demos using conventional texture sizes were available at Comdex, and thus making any meaningful comparisons against other chipsets was simply not possible. Hopefully we'll be able to remedy this in the near future.

All day long we trudged through endless stalls and clove through giant traffic jams of cattle-like humanity (A word of advice - the fastest way through a busy trade show like Comdex is to always avoid the designated walkways in crowded areas). Finally, lured by the promises of "cute Bajoran women" we detoured through the Hilton's Star Trek theme area. A section of the casino was converted into a mini-mall patterned after the Promenade on Deep Space Nine.

As far as Las Vegas tourist traps go, this one was better than most, although the floor plan was more than slightly awkward - actually leading to a dead-end after a long and empty corridor. In hindsight, having a Ferengi chase after some grouchy turbo-geeks bearing Comdex swag and radio gear across the Promenade was actually pretty funny. After walking down the dead-end corridor and having dreams of Dabo girls go unfulfilled, it was hard for us to appreciate the humor at the time.

Overall the Best of Show would have to go to - the Leonids. The desert off the highway en route to Las Vegas in the pre-dawn hours was a perfect way to view the meteor shower, and it was quite a show, even if America didn't get to see its peak. Relatively speaking, Comdex was something of a bust this year. Nothing really stood out and said "look at me!" Having said that, the Voyetra Turtle Beach Montego 2 deserves the nod for offering so many accelerated voices and true positional sound, both of which simulation players should find invaluable should the necessary game support materialize.