CES 2010 Coverage

Homeplug:

Homeplug has been working on solving some of the home networking issues that are present for the type of users that need the lowest latencies that they can possibly get. They came up with their Powerline concept. The IEEE 1901 Powerline Communications Standard (PLC) is the idea of pressing power lines into performing double-duty (as both a provider of current and a carrier of communications signalling) and has been attempted before with varying success for over one hundred years. The basic idea of the PLC is that you are able to plug in a device such as the Belkin Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit. With this, you are going to be able to plug one in near your router and the device will send your network signal over the power lines that run in your wall. Then you can connect your computer to the device and be connected to the network in a different room, receiving speeds up to 1000Mbps.

PC Gaming Alliance:

The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) is a non-profit corporation whose mission is to promote PC gaming worldwide. The PCGA provides an open forum, where companies can cooperate to develop and promote solutions and activities that drive the PC gaming industry forward. Their booth was showing off the ATI Eyefinity technology using a HD 5xxx series card displaying Dirt 2, a game that uses a few of the DX11 features such as hardware-based Tessellation. That helps improve overall performance and the visual quality of water, crowds and cloth effects; and post processing visual effects such as shadow filtering and depth of field accelerated through DirectCompute 11 (Shader Model 5.0).