All in all, what Microsoft announced will probably make a sweet gaming machine, in spite of the unified 64MB of memory. But, a year from now, a new mid-range gaming system may be armed with a 1GHz CPU and about a gigapixel of fillrate. If that's the case, we don't think the PC gaming market has anything to worry about, but Nintendo's Dolphin, Sega's Dreamcast, and Sony's PlayStation 2 just might.
One good sign for the X-Box is the amount of industry support announced. Activision, EA, Eidos and more have announced plans for X-Box games. Also, Microsoft will have their own X-Box gaming division.
It's worth paying attention to the fact that the X-Box will come with ethernet built in and not a modem, like the Dreamcast. With cable modems and DSL becoming more and more widespread, Microsoft apparently doesn't expect the lack of included modem to be a problem.
With their recent next-gen technology announcement, ATI induced a lot of curiosity at GDC. Although their booth was powered primarily with Rage 128 Pros and Mobility 128 demonstrations, ATI's private suite was another matter all together.
If you read our ATI Next Gen Explored article, you may have asked yourself, "Is this going to be able to beat the next-gen products from 3dfx or NVIDIA?" We asked ourselves the same question, and it seemed as though the ATI team could read our minds.
To our surprise, ATI representative Brian Hentschel produced a card based on the Charisma Engine/Pixel Tapestry, which had just come in from the foundry only a few days earlier. Running on alpha silicon and 3-day-old drivers, we were told the card was performing around 2/3 of its final speed.