Plantronics, Seagate, Toshiba, Ubicom and Viewsonic show off their wares in part 2 of our eFocus video series.
Plantronics is known for their business wired and wireless headsets, but they are now branching out into the gaming market. Company officials demonstrated headsets for both Xbox consoles and PCs.
Seagate had a whole lineup of hard drives at its booth, with the most interesting being its 8 GB micro hard drive and a 6 GB "hockey puck" USB drive. Toshiba displayed several laptops, including new gaming devices powered by Nvidia Geforce Go GS or GTX 7900 video cards.
Lag is the scourge of most gamers, but Ubicom promises that they have a solution with its "StreamEngine" technology. StreamEngine is a combination of software and hardware that scans network traffic and reorders them. The silicon is being used in a number of routers from D-Link including their Gaming Router and by Linksys in their new Network Optimizer for gaming & VoIP. Ubicom promises that reducing lag won't require any configuration changes or router tweaking
Two computers were set up at their booth representing a home user and a server on the Internet side. A simulated 256 kilobit per second DSL connection was running both Unreal Tournament 2004 and a file transfer in the background. Gameplay was jerky at times, but was very noticeable on the server computer where the opposing character appeared to teleport around the battlefield.
Enjoy the videos!
Video Download: eFocus, Part 2
H.264 high-resolution video (6:07 min) 1 Mbit/s - 48 MB
WMV low-resolution video 512 kbit/s - 26.9 MB
