Virtua Fighter 5 Unveiled

For all you fighting game fans out there, yesterday was a major day as Sega finally showed the first footage of VF5. Running on the company's new Lindbergh arcade hardware, which is reported to be comprised of a Pentium 4 3GHz CPU, with 1GB DDR SDRAM PC3200 and a custom nVidia GPU with 256MB GDDR3 RAM, the game footage looked quite impressive and provided a sneak peak at two new characters. It's an interesting choice for Sega to create a hardware system that is so focused on PC components, but cost was obviously a major issue. The other aspect that's interesting is that the nVidia hardware should make porting over to the PS3 considerably easier. Let's hope an announcement comes shortly in the near future.

Here is the first official picture released by Sega:



For those of you with the latest version of Quicktime, here is some footage of all of the currently announced Lindbergh titles. You can see the two new characters that will be appearing in VF5 at the very end of the video.

Handheld of the Future?

This is an amazing experiment being done over at the IBM labs with the Cell processor. What it could mean in the future is handheld devices that are much cheaper but could display far greater visuals then could be done normally (at least on a realistic cost basis). You could take this one step further and imagine tvs with Cell chips in them which stream out information to your remote controller (which has a display screen) and take the simple act of viewing shows to a whole new level. Anyway, here is the short blog entry by one of the architects of the Cell, primarily responsible for the synergistic processors:

http://gametomorrow.com/