This year at Comic-Con AMD is one of the convention's sponsors. They set up a demonstration area in the Omni Hotel across the street from Comic-Con. In that room was some really interesting things I think all gamers and tech people should check out.
I asked the usual "when will X come out" questions. Everyone was tight lipped about when the Bulldozer CPU, future consoles, and the 7000 series of video cards will come out. The best answer I could get was, "they will come out soon." But they had two main things at this exhibit that turned out to be just as exciting.
The first experience I had was the "Virtusphere." It is a giant ball that you walk inside of like a giant "hamster ball/wheel" for humans. The wheel acts as a controller for games. It was set up to play Fallout New Vegas. When you walked in the ball you "walked" through the game. Instead of using a screen you used "virtual reality" goggles. So you felt like you were in the game moving around as if you were there. The ball allowed you to walk in all directions and you looked around and aimed your gun independent of your foot movement with the goggles. Well, I don't think I will be able to afford this for my home but it was a very cool experience.
The second experience I had was using AMD's new A series "APU. APU is AMD's term for a CPU with a graphics processor integrated inside the CPU. There were several APU equipped laptops loaded with games for people to try out. I used the Lenovo Z575 laptop with Shogun 2 - Total War installed. In a previous post I had lamented that it was time to upgrade my system. Well, after playing with AMD's A6-3400M APU I was impressed. The game play was smooth. This demo finally made my "high" end computer at home feel old.. When your old system finally feels slow and new hardware is at a reasonable price that is the time to upgrade. The Lenovo Z575 is a fairly reasonably priced computer and the APUs for desktops from AMD are too. (For example, at the time of this post NewEgg.com is selling two of these processors for under a hundred and forty dollars)
I think my next computer build will be with an APU and I will experiment with how well it plays all my games. I have always had two computers at home. One computer has low power consumption that can play old games and that I can do my day to day chores on. The other computer has higher power consumption (usually because of the video card) and can play my newest games well. I could see myself buying an APU to replace both my aging low and "high" end computers now and build a higher end Bulldozer CPU based computer in the future. The APU would get me through the upgrade I need to do until Bulldozer comes out and prices fall enough for me to afford the newer technology. I wasn't excited at first about the laptops that were set up and almost just walked out. But I gave them a try and was very surprised and walked away thinking about buying an APU based computer. I guess the "hamster ball" did its job in bringing me in long enough to give a new technology a try.
