New handheld game devices and computer video cards were big things at this year's E3 show in Los Angeles. In this number one trade show for the video game industry, hardware was part of the buzz. Sony, Nintendo, and N-Gage all introduced new gaming consoles. ATI and NVIDIA also showed off their newest high-end 3D gaming video cards.

Sony introduced its Playstation Portable, also known as the PSP. This handheld will not only play games, but is also a media player for music and video. Its TFT LCD screen is able to show 16.77 million colors at a 480 x 272 native resolution. Its processor run at 333 MHz and has 32 MB of internal RAM. It uses a proprietary Universal Media Disc of 60 mm in diameter and can store 1.8 GB. With this you can play back MPEG-4 Video and ATRAC3plus™and PCM audio. There is a digital rights management system, which includes unique disc ID, 128 bit encryption, and a unique ID for each PSP unit. It will have built-in stereo speakers, exterior headphone connector, brightness control, and sound mode selection. It will also have Wi-Fi (802.11b), USB 2.0, Memory Stick and inferred data transfer. It will weigh 8 oz and be 6.7" wide, 2.9" tall and 0.9" deep.

The graphics look a lot better than any of the current handhelds out there. With its Wi-Fi capability you can walk into a Wi-Fi equipped Starbucks and not only be able get a cup of coffee, but play a game with a friend on the opposite side of the world. It will hit the store shelves in North America and Europe in the spring of 2005, but will be released in Japan before the end of 2004.

Nintendo, the dominating force in the handheld gaming market, showed off its new DS. DS stands for Dual Screen, with one screen above the other. Its fold over clamshell design is similar to the Game Boy Advance, but with a screen on each half. With this design one of your screens would be like the main screen on the game and the other screen could be a map of the game environment or a tactical display showing where you friends and enemies are. You will be able to play your older Game Boy Advance games along with the new DS games.

The screens are 3 inches, 3D and backlit; but the bottom one is also a touch screen. The touch screen will allow a stylus to compose and send messages via the system's Wi-Fi (802.11b) capability. It will also have the Nintendo short-range wireless LAN that can connect up to 16 players with 30 feet of each other. Release in North America and Japan is scheduled before the end of 2004, with European release in first quarter 2005.

Nokia's N-Gage portable game system and cell phone combination launched at E3 2003, but sales have been much below Nokia's expectations. So only a year later Nokia has put out a new handheld, the QD. It is much better ergonomically designed and you no longer have to talk to it as a cell phone on its side. Controls seem to be good and graphics display improved. You can also connect them via Bluetooth and play others around the world via cell phone connection facilitated by the N-Gage Arena. A lot more games have been developed and Nokia has been able to attract some major third party developers. However, with competition from the new handheld offerings by Sony and Nintendo there is a big question whether the QD will be successful in the marketplace.

It's spring, so it's time for another round of ATI vs. NVIDIA. What makes this round interesting is that they used different design philosophies in developing the graphics chips going into their cards. ATI decided in its X800 series (X800 Pro & X800 XT Platinum) that the best thing to do now is to concentrate getting the best performance out of the current games. They decided not to implement the newer 3.0 shader standards, but to optimize on the current 2.0 standards with 24 bit floating point precision. So they took an evolutionary approach from their previous cards increasing the speed of the graphics processors and related graphics board components. This resulted in producing the fastest card out there using current games, including the current video card 3D graphics game stress test, Ubisoft's Far Cry.

The power requirements for ATI's boards is lower than the equivalent NVIDIA boards, so you are less likely to have to upgrade your power supply. However, NVIDIA decided it was time to make the move to newer technology. So in their GeForce 6800 series of graphics processors/video cards (6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, & 6800 Ultra Extreme) they implemented the new 3.0 shader standards along with some other optimizations, including 32 bit floating point precision. 3.0 allows some greater optimization of graphics programming and data than is possible with 2.0.

The NVIDIA cards may not be the fastest, but they are no slackers either. Remember that you will only tax high end video cards if you are playing a highly graphics intensive game in a resolution higher than 1024x768, Far Cry being a possible exception to this rule and the upcoming Half Life 2 and Doom3 being possible exceptions too. The image quality is considered less than ATI's, but that might have to do with NVIDIA driver developers not having had enough time to optimize their drivers for the new technology in the NVIDIA graphics processors and new drivers may solve this.

Another differentiation is how both manufacturers' cards help with compressing and decompressing video and with digital content creation. NVIDIA is ahead of the game on this with this functionality being fully programmable. So it not only can help with the current codecs and formats, but also can be programmed for optimization of future ones. Also it can help with rendering in digital content creation, such as computer graphics, visual effects, and animation that you might wish to include in your videos (NVIDIA is working with Adobe Systems and others to enable content creation software to use this capability).

ATI has opted for a programmable subsystem in this area, but probably less capable than NVIDIA's. As such, ATI cards will be able to assist in some of the more widely used formats such as MPEG 1 & 2 and Windows Media 9, but not be able to take full advantage of future developments as NVIDIA has designed."
So which cards you should look at depends on how you will use them. If you want the best for the current games and you are not into creating your own videos or graphics, you should lean toward the ATIs. If you plan to keep using your card for a number of years or creating your own videos or graphics you should lean toward NVIDIA. Remember too that prices for all these cards when they come out will be greater than $300 (one preorder price quote is currently at $609), the price of video cards drops over time (The price of the top card a year ago was over $400 and is now $225), and we have the transition from the AGP slot to the PCI Express Graphics Slot just around the corner.

Yes, these are new gaming handhelds and PC video cards. You may want the newest thing, but be before plunking down the cash consider whether these will meet your needs and worth the cash. But these new hardware offerings are very temping.

Timothy Everingham is a member of TUGNET. Further information can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~teveringham