As is its tradition, COMDEX is a serious industry trade show, where the favorite buzzwords of the year zip back and forth like so many business cards. This year, the terms "Thin Client", "Intranet", and "Scalable Web Server" were the favorites. Clearly COMDEX is no E3, by any standard. However, each year we always find something of interest for gamers, and this year is no exception.

First up was the NEC booth, where we got a look at the PowerVR booth where they were demonstrating a number of games, with the spotlight on Ultim@te Race Pro -the updated version of the racing game that ships with the PowerVR. This was running on the PCX2 chipset at 800x600. In all honesty, it was doing a marvellous job at competing against the Voodoo1. The PCX2 seems to be very close in almost all aspects of performance, although it still could go a little further in Direct3D. PowerVR technology has certainly matured considerably.

While it doesn't relate directly to combat simulations, the game Messiah at the NEC booth was of particular interest. Even though it is not a sim, Messiah has a very unique 3d rendering engine that may show up in sims at some point in the future. All the characters in the game are stored as very complex models . A virtual camera is pointed at the model to determine the shape of the redered version. Using the information available from this, the program then paints polygons to fill in the area.The result is that since the flexible painting "brushes" rather than inflexible facets, the polygon count drawn can be scaled smoothly up and down to compensate for various angles, distances, and complex curves. The characters have a slightly strange paper-cut-out look from time to time, but mostly the results have been fantastic. This technology allows a very efficient use of polygons, even if it looks a little odd at first. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Notable for its abscence was the heavily touted AMD K6/3D CPU. What with all the talk about this CPU lately, we were certain there would be technology demos or other "proof-of-concept" demonstrations. Unfortunately, things did not work out that way. AMD reps explained that the information on the K6/3D was not supposed to be released so soon, and so there was no information available. We're very curious to learn more about what this chip can offer, and look forward to the next opportunity were we might see what tricks are up its sleeves.

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