This year's E3 (Electronic Entertainment Exposition), held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, was quite the game show. No, Regis wasn't there in a shiny suit handing out cash. The show was all about games. While there was plenty of hardware on the show floor, most of it was in use to display hot new titles. Very little hardware was on display for its own sake.

From the surface, it would seem as though "hardware season" passed with WinHEC last month. All the newest consoles and video cards that could have gone on display at E3 have already been announced. We have already tested the GeForce2 GTS and Voodoo5 5500 as well as the Dreamcast and PlayStation2. But if you looked closely at displays on the show floor, or if you were lucky enough to go behind the scenes like we were, there were some extremely interesting hardware happenings.

NVIDIA had a large suite, but we did not see anything new. We did, however, see plenty of "big name" GeForce2 GTS powered systems all over the expo showing off sparkly new games. Guillemot's "3D Prophet II GTS" (a good eight syllables) and Creative's "3D Blaster Annihilator 2" (a whopping ten syllables) were quite common. We also saw plenty of Elsa's "GLADIAC" (only three syllables, but it makes up for it in puzzlement). Even 3dfx had a GeForce2 GTS behind closed doors, though they were using it to compare to the Voodoo5 5500's speed, quality and compatibility advantages when using FSAA.

Many of the developers we spoke with said they were making use of NVIDIA's hardware T&L engine. We were told by a Shiny Entertainment team member that "Sacrifice," an upcoming RTS, will make heavy use of hardware T&L. In fact, they were showing off the game on a GeForce2 GTS and it was running quite smoothly. He did say that the game makes heavy use of LOD (Level of Detail) and that it should scale well to lesser hardware. We noticed the shading on the terrain and asked whether or not the game will use per-pixel shading. He said that Sacrifice will use plain old vertex lighting.