With the New Year came CES, the largest consumer electronics expo in Northward America. We traveled to Las Vegas to attend the event and bring yous the scoop on some of the latest products from the main players in the computing world.

As it'southward condign more common, the majority of big announcements were fabricated even before the show started as every company tried to jump ahead each other in order to grab everybody's attention. This year wasn't the exception and in fact the few major announcements fabricated throughout the week were promptly taken care of in our regular news coverage. Thus this commodity is not meant to be a retentivity refresher, merely to give yous a cursory outlook on what we observed and what caught our attending during the show.

ATI/AMD

By far the about organized and productive meeting we had the whole week was with the guys at AMD/ATI. As you lot are well aware, the company has been pushing its Radeon Hard disk 5000 series desktop graphics cards for some fourth dimension now. Last week they appear they had shipped its two millionth DirectX 11-capable GPU, officially overcoming the short supply problems from terminal year. This will open up the door for more graphics cards in the 5000 series, filling the gap in the upkeep market place where previous generation HD 4000 boards were pulling the trick for the moment.

New Mobility Radeon chips derived from its desktop counterparts were announced along with pattern wins from most every major notebook manufacturer. This translates into mobile support for Eyefinity and DX11, with the superlative of the line Mobility Radeon Hard disk 5870 expected to perform at the level of a desktop 5700 serial card.

AMD was showcasing unlike scenarios where GPU features were beingness used. Near impressive were iii and 6 screen Eyefinity setups running smoothly in a number of games. In that location was likewise a paradigm XGP (External Graphics Platform) box using the new Mobility Radeon HD 5870 GPU running Tom Clancy's HAWX in iii screens. We asked AMD about the condition of XGP and the reason it hasn't been supported as widely as we hoped – for now it'southward been limited to a few European markets. Ultimately, they said they depend on manufacturers to pick upwardly the technology and offer it along with laptops since the box requires a proprietary connection based on PCI Express. The latest version of XGP tin support iii external displays when used with DisplayPort monitors.

Also in the AMD briefing room, we met with a representative for Ostendo Technologies. Yous probably won't know them past name, but these are the guys who developed the curved display applied science previously shown by Alienware and NEC. They have taken the display to market themselves under their ain make and most impressively, they had three of these magnificent 43-inch displays (2880x900 resolution each) hooked up to a latest generation Radeon board. The upshot was an immersive 180-degree feel of gaming goodness.

Besides gaming, I tried using a single curved display in Windows to run across how productivity applications looked similar in this screen. The result was decent plenty, but unfortunately it won't match the sharpness of your regular LCD monitor.

Smartfish Ergomotion (Keyboard)

If you've been reading TechSpot long enough, you will know nosotros are large fans of quality input devices and that doesn't necessarily mean the bells and whistles, only how functional and ergonomic a device can be. A good function of our staff swears past Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic keyboard, so when we saw a footling startup named Smartfish showing a new production in this category we had to take a look.

The Ergomotion keyboard is supposed to forbid repetitive strain injuries (RSI) by subtly moving the two keyboard panels to the sides -- it'southward broken in 2 like the Microsoft Natural -- and tilting information technology slightly back and forth when it recognizes repetitive typing patterns. We couldn't test the keyboard for long, nor could we bring one with us for testing, but I would say information technology looks compelling enough to take a closer await when information technology ships in March, hopefully at a decent toll.