First off, this isn't about benchmarks. It is about marketing, stockholders, corporate political necessity, a journalist and his toys and somewhere, buried way down there, it is about a group of engineers working very hard to achieve something innovative and possibly great so that you and I can Kill and Maim and Shave the Princess at ever higher resolutions and frame rates.

Actually, it isn't anything nearly so grand, but we do have an update on what happened to VideoLogic/NEC's PowerVR Series 2 PC chip production schedule, which is almost as good!

In the NEC booth at COMDEX '98, PowerVR was showing an arcade box running Ultim@te race and a Dreamcast running a montage of game demos both rendered 3D and FMV playback. The PC product on demo publicly had signage indicating it was the new product (.25 micron, 2D/3D, etc.) but was actually an ACR 1 3D only, .35 micron, 66Mhz relic from last spring. This led to some confusion for journalists and developers. This being my first turn out as both journalist and developer, I had an interesting time with a foot in each world.

After an hour discussing game developer issues (under NDA) we made the switch over to the Sharky Extreme business and the VideoLogic and NEC fellows were quite helpful in separating the printable from the unprintable.

To break the suspense, here is what Trevor Wing, Vice President of Marketing & Sales, Multimedia Technology and member of the Executive Board at VideoLogic, says about the current status of the PC chip(s):

"The Series 2 PC chip engineering samples are out of FAB. Customers and top developers will receive samples in November. 2nd tier developers will receive their parts soon after. We expect to be entering volume production by the end of the year and anticipate board level products at retail by end of Q1 '99. Performance is impressive."

Now doesn't that feel a bit better? No? Well here are a few early conclusions: