The conference began with a panel presentation that included Nvidia chief technical officer Kurt Akeley, chief scientist David Kirk, software engineering vice president Dwight Diercks, and software engineering director Nick Triantos. The panel opened with a vague reference to the "colorful rumors" that have spread across the Internet like wildfire concerning the seemingly lackluster performance of Nvidia's GeForce FX 3D accelerator cards compared to ATI's Radeon 9800, which was released in April, to say nothing of the competitor's newly-released 9800 XT card.
The panel highlighted what Nvidia apparently believes to be the most important aspects of designing new graphics hardware. One of these aspects is creating cards with physical architecture that allows them to be powerful, yet affordable. The company's current line of cards based on the GeForce FX architecture (which is included in the GeForce FX 5800 and 5900 series), attempts to maximize high-end graphics performance by supporting both 16-bit and 32-bit per-color-channel shaders--most DirectX 9-based games use a combination of 16-bit and 32-bit calculations, since the former provides speed at the cost of inflexibility, while the latter provides a greater level of programming control at the cost of processing cycles. The panel went on to explain that 24-bit calculations, such as those used by the Radeon 9800's pixel shaders, often aren't enough for more-complex calculations, which can require 32-bit math. As the panel explained, the GeForce FX architecture favors long shaders and textures interleaved in pairs, while the Radeon 9800 architecture favors short shaders and textures in blocks.
The panel then discussed Nvidia's comprehensive internal QA policy on optimizations, which states that the company refuses to optimize its drivers for specific benchmarks that emphasize features not found in real games, which is, as the representatives suggested, the reason why the most recent cards haven't shown universally high performance in recent benchmarks. The company also reiterated its commitment to image fidelity--rather than opt not to draw certain parts of a scene, GeForce FX cards draw every last part and effect. As an example, the panel showed two screenshots of an explosion from an overdraw benchmark, in which the GeForce card drew the entire explosion as a bright white flare, ATI Radeon card didn't draw every layer of the explosion (the upper-right corner had a slight reddish tinge).
The rest of the event featured individual product demonstrations, though panel discussion was capped off at midday with a "fireside chat" featuring Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, who discussed the importance of advanced graphical effects in id's upcoming Doom 3. Huang also made the interesting claim that although his company has recently experienced a loss of market share (Nvidia has traditionally sold the most graphics cards, from its entire product line, of any manufacturer), this loss was due not to competition from ATI, but rather, to competition from Intel's integrated graphics. According to Huang, Intel's integrated graphics hardware (or "Free-D"), which comes bundled with new pre-built Intel PCs, is very attractive to mainstream users because of its price point.
