E3 1999 Coverage

AMD, ATI, and GoD

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Across the street from the LA Convention Center where E3 was being held, was a small group of trailers that affectionately became known as the trailer park. Sponsored by AMD, ATI, and God (Gathering of Developers), a variety of trailers were set up to showcase a number of upcoming games from God A live band was there to help entertain everyone who decided to come out, relax in the beautiful weather, and have a few drinks.

Not particularly interested in the games on display, we decided to speak with AMD first. They told us that the K7 is still on schedule and will ship at 550 and 600MHz. A 200MHz bus runs between the chipset and the processor, while the RAM runs asynchronously at 133MHz. The first chipset will be from AMD, but VIA, ALi, and others will follow.

When they let us know that the games were being shown on K7 systems, we immediately jumped in line to check out the demos. We saw Heavy Metal: FAKK2 running a K7/550 with a TNT card running at 640x480. Nothing else was known about the system. Heavy Metal features the Quake 3 engine with quite a few enhancements. The frame rate appeared to hover near 30fps, although no frame rates were given.

Speaking to the guys from Ritual, the game's designers, they let us know that they could not make any comparisons to other processors. However, they did tell us that they expected the K7 to be very competitive with the Pentium III and had been quite pleased with their development system. In the one week that they had the system, they said it only crashed once. One developer did go as far as to say "the K7 could finally be the thing to knock off Intel." Of course, we'll have to wait and see if that really happens, but it sounds like there is definitely hope.

ATI let us know that the All-in-Wonder 128 16MB boards should be shipping any day now, so expect those on store shelves soon. The 32MB model won't be available for a few more months, unfortunately.