Robert and Peter interview NVIDIA's David Ragones
NVIDIA’s booth in the South Hall of the LVCC was swarming with people when we showed up for our scheduled appointment. Why the excitement? NVIDIA had a significant number of new products on display, including a variety of 3D demo displays set up.
And that's as close as we got to Fermi. Three watercooled GF100s in that sucker
We were shown all of NVIDIA’s new tech on the showfloor, including the impressive 3D Rocket Sled demo running on three watercooled Fermi cards. The physics data offered by GF100 was very impressive when visualized. Thomas “Tap” Petersen showed us the demo not only with object wireframes turned on, but with physics wireframes as well, which really helps understand what physics processing can do.
Velocity lines, deformation, heat, and other physical properties were being rendered in real time by the GF100 cards. With all of the new information available, it is up to game developers to actually do something with the possibilities.
Predictably, NVIDIA was showing a huge variety of 3D applications: 3D Blu-ray, 3D photo viewing, 3D media center interface, 3D gaming, and 3D television. If 3D impresses you, you would have been impressed.
While 3D didn’t exactly move our emotions any, what is impressive is the power of the gear required to drive it. We saw a full 3D Vision Surround display running on Fermi, sure… but we also saw Batman: Arkham Asylum on three monitors, in 3D, running on two GTX285 cards. Peter even got to sit down and play Need for Speed: Shift in full 3D, which was hard to tear him away from.
While GF100 certainly looks impressive on screen, it’s very hard to tell exactly how impressive it is until we see specs—and despite asking several NVIDIA reps, no one would utter so much as a single digit.
Therefore, we have to be content with what we were able to see: Tegra 2 is a very impressive little chip in a tiny, tiny form factor. We saw a number of small devices made possible by Tegra 2, including a few tablets, and the D-Link Boxee Box.
Overall, NVIDIA seems set to be able to make a serious push in 2010—while we have to reserve judgment to see if they can compete with AMD in discrete GPUs, they have several other key technologies that will make NVIDIA a household name in 2010, even if it’s not in enthusiast parts.
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