Live from the Game Developers Conference

Bernie Yee hit this week's Game Developers Conference in San Jose for us, and here's what he found:

ATI just announced that Qualcomm is going to use their newest 3D mobile graphics chip, the Imageon, in their next generation of handsets. Now, Motorola and Tapwave have been using the earlier generation of this chip, but the Imageon is the first ATI product with 3D support built-into the hardware (rather than trying to do it all in the software).  While you probably won't see cellphones with Imageon in consumers' hands before 2005, it looks to me that phones with it will be more powerful than a Gameboy Advance — or maybe even an N-Gage. nVidia has a mobile 3D
solution too, but at GDC there were actually prototypes of handset-sized demos running with the ATI chip.

Logitech announced a few new gaming peripherals — 2 wireless, 2.4GHz controllers (one for the PS2 and another for Xbox), that run on just 2 batteries and promise 50 hours of non-stop button-mashing fun. They were pleasantly sleek and comfortable, and felt not at all laggy even when playing a very latency-sensitive game like
Virtua Fighter 4. And in time for the long-awaited release of Gran Turismo 4, Logitech also showed off a new driving controller for the PS2 (pictured above), a wheel that allows 600 degrees of freedom (which means hand-over-hand steering action).