QuakeCon 2009 served as a place where a few PC hardware companies revealed some new products to the public and even one secret reveal to a few attendees. One was Dell's
Alienware unit who recently expanded from making gaming PCs into also making some peripherals as well. Alienware has already released their own monitor and headset but at QuakeCon they debuted two upcoming items that are not scheduled to be sold until the end of the month.
The Alienware Tactics Keyboard and The Alienware Tactics PC Mouse are both designed to be on the high end of market. The keyboard has features such as media controls on top. The mouse features programmable buttons and up to 5000 dpi sensitivity. Both the mouse and keyboard products will be priced at $99 each when they are released. During a QuakeCon Alienware presentation it was hinted that the company will also have some big announcements coming in about four weeks.
Meanwhile
AMD invited a few PC hardware specific web sites to get a sneak peak at their upcoming
ATI DirectX11 graphics card, currently code named "Evergreen". AMD was very secretive about the whole affair;
according to Legit Reviews the company didn't even show the card itself. It was running in a PC card that had a side window but even that was shrouded in spray adhesive. AMD showed a few DirectX11 SDK demos as well as the
Wolfenstein demo (which is DirectX9 based) but the presentation was mainly to show that their DirectX11 card is indeed up and running. It's likely it will be released around the same time as Windows 7's shipment to stores in late October.
The PC Perspective QuakeCon event showed off a brief and so far unreleased trailer for
DiRT 2, the upcoming racing game from
Codemasters.
DiRT 2 is so far the only upcoming PC game confirmed to be running under DirectX11 and the video showed off how the PC version of the game, due out in December, looks while under DirectX11. The brief video showed off some very impressive and realistic looking graphics; in fact they looked almost pre-rendered. We will likely be hearing more about DirectX11 and game support in the coming weeks.
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