Infinium, NVIDIA team up to show Phantom at CES

The Phantom Game Service is set to be shown off on NVIDIA's South Hall booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, as well as on Microsoft's booth in the Central Hall.

NVIDIA is providing the graphics chipset for the console, which will play PC games downloaded over broadband networks and will run a version of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system.

The graphics giant believes that the console, which is scheduled for a 2005 launch after missing its planned pre-Christmas launch date in North America, demonstrates the growing market for high end graphics chips in the home entertainment sector.

"Gamers want crisp, vivid images," commented Infinium Labs president Kevin Bachus. "NVIDIA's GeForce and nForce processors will help us deliver the best possible on-demand performance to our customers, direct to the living room."

Much of the publicity around Infinium Labs in recent months has focused not on the Phantom device itself, but rather on the company's uncertain financial position and on lawsuits taken out against it by various parties.

CES will give Infinium an opportunity to place its device and delivery service back in the forefront of its publicity. The firm claims to have signed up almost two dozen publishers to provide content for the service, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos and Vivendi Universal; it will be interesting to see which titles, if any, it chooses to demonstrate at the show.