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No Boundaries (Gaming Special)

by Team Digit / Mar 01, 2007 17:16:58 IST / Tags: RAM, HDMI, Input Devices, Gaming, DX10, CPU, GPU, album

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Mobile Gaming (Omnipresent)

It has been conjectured both by outsiders and by Microsoft itself
that the Zune can do more than just play music

Playing games on the move was limited to Snake on the cell phone or to Nintendo games on a GameBoy platform. Until recently. On the console front, both the Nintendo DS and the Sony PlayStation Portable have opened up new markets and new avenues to gameplay-while the DS offers a completely new interface (driven by both touch and sound), the PSP brings console-level graphics and gameplay to a handheld device, not to mention its multimedia capabilities.

Beyond these two recent additions, players haven't had much success establishing new platforms in the mobile space. Gizmondo came and went with barely a whimper, N-Gage was met with a lukewarm reception, and niche players such as GP2X are, well, niche.

The market might see some new platforms in the future. Microsoft may or may not release a handheld version of its Xbox console, but it has certainly take a step into the mobile gaming space through its cell phone, PDA, and now Origami software. Origami is the concept of a handheld PC or as Microsoft calls it, ultra-mobile PC (UMPC). It is simply taking the Windows OS and running it in a handheld form factor. Hardware willing, any game capable of running on the PC should also be able to run on a UMPC, which should open up the possibility of playing old DOS and Windows games on the move. An interesting hardware development here would be the scaling down of the current generation of gaming GPUs-ATI, for example, has recently talked about stripping down its R500 GPU to make it suitable to a handheld form-factor. There are also rumours that NVIDIA has a chip in the works for the next version of the PSP.

Microsoft has another hardware device up its sleeve in the form of the Zune. It has always been conjectured both by outsiders and by Microsoft itself that the Zune can do more than just play music. It already syncs with an Xbox Live profile; could it not also run Xbox Live Arcade games in the future? If not in its current avatar, certainly in a newer version.

Nokia is perhaps the biggest competitor to Microsoft in this space. It already tried to establish itself as a phone-plus-gaming console with the N-Gage-while that initiative might have failed, Nokia probably won't stop trying, especially when there's a large, untapped market to be, umm, tapped. One of the ways ahead for Nokia would be to create tools for creating and maintaining a gaming platform on Nokia devices, instead of a dedicated device such as the N-Gage. In early 2006, it took the first step to such a platform by releasing an SDK (software development kit) containing tools and a consumer interface to access and purchase games using a cell phone.

Let's not forget Apple. One can already pick up casual games from the likes of PopCap at the iTunes store, plus rumours point to at least two new products that will have gaming capabilities-one being the Apple TV set-top box which will sit in the living room, and the other, the current talk-of-the-town-the iPhone. The iPhone is a closed platform-much like a gaming console-and you won't find games and software being developed for the device by just any software house. This does not exclude big names though: recent rumours point to both PopCap and EA developing games for the device. While the iPhone's specs haven't been made public, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the hardware capable of running some decent games: it can play videos, it runs a stripped-down version of OS X, and has multiple ARM processors.

Gaming on the move is an exciting prospect; imagine playing a game of Halo while paying superficial attention to a boring meeting-which you must never do. No sir.

Processors (Hard Core!)

We would generally recommend that you go in for a slightly slower
quad-core solution than a faster dual-core one

In only a matter of months, the processor industry changed its tune from clock speed to multi-cores-so quickly did this happen that it left tech-heads swooning. Intel was quick to drop speed from its DNA, since it was virtually humiliated over the humbling performance of its Netburst architecture against the mighty AMD K8.

The order of the day is dual-core processors-AMD's Athlon 64 X2 series with its integrated Southbridge and HyperTransport vs. Intel's Core Duo, and more importantly, its Core 2 Duo line. Intel is winning this particular performance battle with the Core 2 Duos. AMD has yet to refresh its aging K8 architecture, but is instead offering a redesign of its Opteron line in a quad-core configuration code-named "Barcelona," a few months from now. AMD has made it clear that we should expect the Barcelona processors to be 40 per cent faster than Intel's quad-core Xeons across "a wide variety of workloads." With Dell currently offering quad-core Opterons, AMD's offerings could become popular with the introduction of Barcelona. Indeed, AMD expects Barcelona to capture 30 per cent of the quad-core market, up from its current zero per cent share.

As of now, though, AMD has a dual-core, dual-socket option for the enthusiast market with a tweakable BIOS and SLI support, called the Quad FX platform (a.k.a. 4x4). AMD should also drop its processor prices across the board by the time you read this. Mostly, the drop will be to make way for the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor, which is expected any time soon as of this writing. Price drops are rumoured to be significant across the board: the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is said to drop from $138 to $113, the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ from $215 to $195, and the Athlon 64 X2 5200+ to just $222 from its current price of $295. Note that these are suggested distributor prices. With these cuts, AMD will still remain the best processor you can buy, offering the best value in terms of both price and performance. Factor in pure speed, though, and Intel is still champion.

Quad-core processors from Intel already offer a significant advantage over their dual-core siblings, and we would generally recommend that you go in for a slightly slower quad-core solution than a faster dual-core one, especially if you are a gamer or a graphics/3D designer. Intel is also looking to introduce faster FSB to its processor range, this will tie in closely with the introduction of new chipsets, of course: Intel will introduce Core 2 models ending in "50" (Core 2 Duo E6850 and E6650) which will take advantage of the 1333 MHz FSB. The newer cores will only officially be supported on Intel's upcoming x35 series of chipsets. Meanwhile, the low-end 6000 series will also receive a cache boost-a 4 MB L2 cache will give a nice performance boost like it does their more expensive brethren. Prices will remain the same.

Meanwhile, the K10 core from AMD should burrow out of its secret underground bunker-competition is good, and we can't imagine AMD letting Intel get away with the performance crown. Intel, though, is already drumming up plans for 80-core processors against the silence of its arch-rival: these multi-core units are not expected for another five years, but it is heartening to see their game plan so early in the cycle.

One of the biggest problems for multi-core in the future would be that of memory bandwidth. Interestingly, graphics cards faced much the same problem and solved them by throwing extremely fast and expensive memory chips at the GPU, along with a wide and speedy bus-scaling such a solution to say 16, 32 or more cores for a CPU becomes prohibitively expensive and impractical.

AMD will likely base a solution to this problem around its HyperTransport bus, while Intel has revealed its future direction through its "Terascale" project: instead of transistors arranged flat on a die, this chip's design consists of 80 tiles laid out in an 8 x 10-block array. Each tile carries a small core that can run a simple instruction set for processing floating-point data. The tile also includes a router connecting the core to an on-chip network that links all the cores to each other and gives them access to memory.

What is tremendously exciting is to imagine a multi-core processor integrate itself with a graphics processor. Both AMD with its Fusion project and Intel with Larrabee are headed in that direction-a massively multi-core processor connected to a large amount of on-die memory and surrounded by specialist vector units-probably the ultimate CGPU!

Graphics cards (Big, hot, and crazy)

There are plans to take the GPU outside the cabinet,
tethered to the PC via a PCIe x16 connector

If you've been reading Digit religiously (is there any other way to read it?), you would be well aware of the changes that graphics cards are going through (for some background on where GPUs are headed, read A New DirectXion, Digit, October 2006). In a nutshell, GPUs are becoming CPU-like; so much so that a day when you see a GPU performing CPU tasks and vice-versa is not very far away. What's more, you might very well see the two integrate-imagine a central processor with bits of GPU connected to it, much like the design of the PlayStation 3 console.

Graphic cards are perhaps the most exciting frontier in the coming years: even as NVIDIA and ATI release DirectX 10 products with as much as 1 GB onboard memory (yikes!), Intel is rumoured to be working secretly on its own GPU design, taking a more traditional x86 route-rumours talk about a CPU-GPU hybrid (a CGPU?) code-named Larrabee, consisting of sixteen cores. The cores are small, in-order x86 mini-processors with a short pipeline and lots of vector hardware to implement some GPU-oriented extension of the x86 instruction set. AMD, too, has talked of its x86-GPU plans, aka Fusion, which plans to marry AMD processors with tech acquired from ATI GPUs. Integrating a processor and a graphics unit like this has many advantages, the biggest being that of the flexibility possible: tasks pertaining to shaders, vector math, CPU-intensive physics, sound, and procedural art and animation could all be balanced on the same chip, making for an extremely efficient piece of silicon. Moreover, a GPU based on the x86 instruction set can leverage years of programming experience, tools and techniques allowing for lowered software development costs.

As things stand, graphics cards are expensive. DirectX 10 cards are currently only available from NVIDIA, and as of this writing, only in two variants-"will financially ruin you" and "will financially ruin your entire family." With competition, prices will fall, and ATI's DX10 monster has just been spotted in the wild.

Prices aren't the only means of putting the hurt on you, though: that ATI card, for example is a nine-inch behemoth with its memory running at slightly more than 1 GHz and a core speed of about 800 MHz. These DirectX 10 cards pull in more than 200 watts, and it wouldn't be a stretch to see vapour- or water-cooling units becoming the norm rather than the exception when the ATI parts appear. And this is just when the cards are running in single mode-throw in SLI and step back, way back: the power requirements would be astronomical (just today we spotted a Chinese PSU on the Net rated at 1000 W!).

There are also plans to take the GPU outside the cabinet, tethered to the PC via a PCIe x16 connector. This will not only prevent total meltdown of your system but would also offer fast graphics to, say, a laptop, or allow for a scenario in which banks of external graphic processors are shared over a network by several computers.

As for what's currently on tap for future buyers-NVIDIA mostly, with ATI to release its line of DX10 cards between March and May '07. NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series looks like this: the 8800 GTX and GTS variants, which vary slightly in clock speeds, and the GTS coming in a leaner 320 MB version, which is also much more affordable than its 640 MB sibling. Also planned is an 8900 GTX core with 25 per cent more shader power (clocked at 700 MHz GPU and 2200 MHz memory). An SLI-on-a-card variant of this is also planned: the GeForce 8950 GX2 will be a dual-chip card based on a new 80-nm G80 chip, clocked at 550 MHz with 2x512MB of 256-bit GDDR4 (memory at 2000 MHz).

ATI's DX10 cards are rumoured to be 65-nm parts, meaning they'll run cooler. The DX10 R600 and RV600 series from ATI will come in various guises-high-end, low-end, dual-cores on a card, and even the external cards mentioned above (code-named Lasso). The R600XTX is the top-of-the-line card, recently spotted with a massive four-heatpipe-powered cooler. It comes with 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory running at over 2000 MHz; 12 inches long, the card is said to consume more than 240 W.

Apart from pushing pixels, these new cards are also HD-ready: ready to decode the highly CPU-taxing codecs of generation next-MPEG-2, H.264, and Microsoft's VC1 format. They also offer full HDCP support-over either DVI-D or HDMI. To be future-proof in the coming months, ensure that any monitors you purchase offer either HDCP over DVI-D, or come with an HDMI port.

Motherboards (Need more sex appeal!)

Two of Vista's key features will make for a "sexy time for motherboards":
ReadyBoost and SideShow

Stop us if you've heard this one-"talking about my computer makes my mother bored" (snigger). Ahem-no, not funny. Motherboards are getting a bit dull, though. We remember the good old days when we would break out into fist-fights in our Digit cantina over the relative merits of an Intel chipset versus an NVIDIA, ATI, or VIA offering; on certain moonless nights, even SiS products were whispered into the darkness. Ah yes, those were the days-today, though, market consolidations and standardisations have taken their toll on our most beloved of simple pleasures. Almost anyone would agree that a good chipset must either be an Intel or an NVIDIA-where's the fun? All you have left to differentiate one motherboard from another is the colour of its PCB ("Look, a RED one!"). Very boring!

Respite might come from an unlikely source, though: Windows Vista! Vista might not be the consumer's best friend, but it is certainly a great window of opportunity for hardware vendors. As Vista goes, two of its key features will make for a much needed "sexy time for motherboards": ReadyBoost and SideShow.

ReadyBoost can use storage space on some removable media devices, such as USB Flash drives, to speed up your computer. Thanks to unprecedented demand and even greater supply, Flash memory is cheap and probably sold by the kilo in some backstreets in China. You should soon see motherboards with embedded Flash storage to leverage this Vista feature.

What the Flash would help with would be caching of frequently-used programs. Vista has a nifty feature called SuperFetch, through which it monitors stuff you run often and caches them to memory, so that future instances of your favourite programs start quicker. Another neat trick that a motherboard with embedded Flash memory might pull off would be to act as an overgrown floppy drive: imagine booting into your favourite Linux distribution, or even a DOS variant upon startup.

SideShow is another neat feature that Vista supports-a SideShow device is like a mini-monitor that displays key information from your Vista system. It could either be a small LCD window on the lid of a laptop which shows you unread mails, battery life and so on when the unit is off, or it might be a clock that shows you your IM buddies, your currently-playing track list or the weather even when your monitor is switched off. For a PC, SideShow would make a great addition if it is wireless-imagine IM and mail notifications while lounging in your living room.

So much for new features-what about chipsets? NVIDIA chipsets are the way to go for AMD processors (perhaps until the time AMD truly assimilates ATI offerings into its product lines). For Intel processors, the roadmap calls for at least one SiS-based motherboard; time will be judge of that product's performance. Today, however, Intel's P965 chipset is the one to watch-it offers product support across the entire Intel line from Pentium D to dual- and even quad-core processors. Barring some performance hiccups (in some instances, the 975X still performs better), and some bad decisions (such as no native support for IDE drives), the P965 would make a great platform for any future Intel purchase. As for choice, the NVIDIA 600i family is perhaps the best route for Intel gamers to take. While the top-end 680i range came with its baggage of problems-from audio issues to data corruption-the problems are largely fixed now, and it is the best non-Intel solution for the high-end. More interesting in the 600 family is the lower-priced 650i chipset, which is meant as a direct competitor to Intel's P965.

The last few months have seen muted support in terms of chipsets for AMD processors. The reason for this could be two-fold: one, AMD bought ATI, so other chipset makers are unsure of how to react; and two, Intel is once again the performance leader with its Core 2 Duo range of processors. There is less noise in the marketing circles for AMD chipsets.

While on AMD, it would be remiss not to mention the new DTX standard the company has proposed for motherboards. DTX will essentially be an extension of the ATX standard for small-form-factor systems. The hardware spec defines two types of motherboards: a standard DTX board, 9.6-inch x 8-inch, and also a smaller mini-DTX unit at 6.7-inch x 8-inch. DTX systems, though small, would be able to accommodate a processor with a thermal envelope of up to 65 W, as well as two expansion cards which could be either PCI or PCI-Express. The form factor also calls for a notebook-style ExpressCard PC card. AMD has already released a review copy of the new standard, and is encouraging contribution from the market to design and evolve the form factor.

Input Devices ( Where is the ANY key? )

You can bet your last rupee that the multi-touchscreen will be
copied by just about every hardware vendor out there

You've seen the movie, or have picked up the scene via osmosis; it's the geek interface zeitgeist-Tom Cruise flicking through files in Minority Report, his fingers are glowing, as part of the interface he is wearing gloves, and he is directly interacting with a hologram image of computer data: flick, flick, "these are not the files I want!", flick, flick… This nature of interactivity might not be for the weak of arms, or the lazy, but as the Wii gaming console has recently shown, any interface that directly translates user input to screen activity is a good interface. So will we see a Minority Report "monitor + glove" combo anytime soon? Surprise: interfaces such as these have already been made and tested in labs around the world. In fact, the interface showcased in the movie was inspired by a project incubated in Microsoft's UI Labs!

Microsoft in particular has been trying unsuccessfully to push two types of interfaces at us. One of them is the Tablet PC way of interaction-pen inputs and handwriting recognition. We think this one hasn't been widely accepted due to the clumsy nature of Tablet PC hardware. Once Tablet PCs become small enough and thin enough-in other words less like laptops and more notebooks-the interface may do better. "May," because there will always be people who hate writing on screen as an input method. The other interface is that of voice and being able to dictate and communicate directly with a computer. Here too, the problem is two-fold: the software is not yet there, and not a lot of people are too keen on dictating to a PC.

So what could be a universal solution to the problem? A direct data dump from the brain to a computer? I hope not, unless the output is supposed to be an incoherent ramble. We can't imagine a unique solution to our input problem of today, but the question then becomes-is there anything wrong with the way we input data today?

While you can't imagine life without keyboard and mouse, you also can't imagine any other input device taking their place-or even complementing them. Well, maybe a joypad if you are a gamer, or a steering wheel if you are really into racing games. What else? Gesture-based computing? Multi-touch interfaces? Mouse and keyboard? Oh yes!

Gaming peripherals will hugely benefit now that Microsoft has decided that Xbox 360 peripherals may play nicely with the PC. You can thus buy a small adapter and a receiving station that will allow you to play games on your PC using the Xbox 360 controller. Also possible is the use of steering wheels on the PC which would have otherwise have been relegated to single duty on the Xbox 360. This blurring between the platforms will certainly help reduce costs for us consumers.

Microsoft is also keen on voice communication with the PC. So much so that Vista comes with voice recognition built in-you can therefore dictate to your word processor or talk dirty to your Web browser, right out of the Vista box. Vista also extends the mouse functions to a digital tablet-if you are an artist and use the Wacom tablet or something similar, chances are that Vista natively supports the pen as an input device: the Ultimate variant of Vista comes with Tablet PC software, which allows handwriting recognition and pen-based gesture navigation.

The coolest aspect of the iPhone is its use of a multi-touch interface. A multi-touchscreen allows multiple inputs. What this means is that the screen can simultaneously listen for, and understand, more than one input point, as opposed to a single point of interaction, as is generally the norm with PDAs and their ilk. This opens up avenues for some funky gesture-based user-device interaction. One iPhone demo showcased the user being able to "pinch" the screen in order to zoom out of a photo. You can bet your last rupee that this interface will be copied by just about every hardware vendor on the face of Earth-brace yourself as multi-touch hits everything from cell phones to microwave ovens!

Finally, there is always the keyboard and the mouse. We hope to see rechargeable batteries marrying wireless keyboards, and please lose those ridiculous multimedia and system keys! We also wouldn't mind seeing some software widgets on our keyboards-so get SideShow to the keyboard, please.

We can't imagine an evolution of the mouse, though… perhaps it could sing to us? Or glow hypnotically? All devices could use some glow-make it happen!

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