Arrived at the Nvidia booth around 3:50 in the afternoon , after a tiring day of walking around the E3 show floor. Upon arrival talked briefly with Derek Perez and Carrie Cowan, PR people for Nvidia and awaited Brian Burke's conclusion of his previous appointment.
Nvidia's booth was a interesting appointment only area with computers and Xboxes all over the general area.
The following games were on display: UT 2003, Project Gotham Racing, Counterstrike, Condition Zero , EarthWeb, Tomb Raider 4 and Sea Dogs 2.
Brian arrived from his prior appointment and we headed off to see if we could find a conference room. We found a corner to talk (all the rooms were occupied) and here's the main things we talked about
1. Ti4200 was released recently. With a MSRP of around $179 , it brings Geforce4 features and great performance to the mainstream market. (expect a Visiontek 128MB 4200 review from me very soon)
2. Nvidia owns around 2-3% of the chipset market
3. Nvidia is working on all kinds of 3d chips while a PDA chip was not specifically mentioned it's a logical next step for Nvidia, in the future, core logic and the successor to the Nforce
4. Nvidia is interested in a P4 bus license of course . (Public statements by Jen-Hsun Huang the CEO state that the main obstacle to this is the high licensing fees asked for by Intel and competing with Intel's own chipsets)
5. We talked in general terms about the future. AGP 8x and DirectX 9 are likely to be the big things pushed this fall.
6. Brian called the Parhelia a interesting product with interesting new features . He questioned the ability of Matrox to mass-produce the chip at high clock frequencies as it's .15um and over 80 million transistors (Matrox is targeting 220mhz as of this writing fyi) .
7. Brian made a further comment that's interesting: Problem with Parhelia, is that it's still a DX8 part. This fall , as you know Microsoft will release DirectX9 and you're either DX9 or you're not this fall.
One could infer some things from this comment, but Brian didn't specifically mention if their next product is DX9 or not.
At this point, I had some technical questions and Brian went looking for someone to answer them . He found Tony Tamasi, Nvidia's Director of Product Development .
8. Talked a bit about anisotropic filtering. Tony said "ATI only anisos about 10% of the given screen at a time, while Nvidia does the whole scene. Different methods and our image quality with aniso is superior" . He didn't call ATI's method rip-mapping btw but similar to it.
9 N-Patches Nvidia will likely include N-Patches as a subset of some other HOS implementation, much like they did with EMBM and Pixel shaders.
10 FSAA- They want to not lose speed with it enabled. Will likely increase number of samples in the future
11. Tony made a interesting quote " Last year we did a demo of the Final Fantasy Movie. The things that were cut down were the resolution and pixel shader effects. By the end of this year we're likely to be able to render the movie with all of the pixel shader effects"
In conclusion, while my meeting with Nvidia didn't go too far into the future, it did get me more than a little excited about it. It was interesting and different to talk to Brian in person for more than the few minutes we usually chat or email about. Nvidia is one of the biggest driving forces in computer graphics today, if not THE biggest.
Nvidia now has around 45% total graphics marketshare in the PC market (including integrated, desktop, mobile) . That's an amazing growth for this company that only 9 years ago was fighting for it's survival with the release of NV1.
Nvidia's booth was a interesting appointment only area with computers and Xboxes all over the general area.
The following games were on display: UT 2003, Project Gotham Racing, Counterstrike, Condition Zero , EarthWeb, Tomb Raider 4 and Sea Dogs 2.
Brian arrived from his prior appointment and we headed off to see if we could find a conference room. We found a corner to talk (all the rooms were occupied) and here's the main things we talked about
1. Ti4200 was released recently. With a MSRP of around $179 , it brings Geforce4 features and great performance to the mainstream market. (expect a Visiontek 128MB 4200 review from me very soon)
2. Nvidia owns around 2-3% of the chipset market
3. Nvidia is working on all kinds of 3d chips while a PDA chip was not specifically mentioned it's a logical next step for Nvidia, in the future, core logic and the successor to the Nforce
4. Nvidia is interested in a P4 bus license of course . (Public statements by Jen-Hsun Huang the CEO state that the main obstacle to this is the high licensing fees asked for by Intel and competing with Intel's own chipsets)
5. We talked in general terms about the future. AGP 8x and DirectX 9 are likely to be the big things pushed this fall.
6. Brian called the Parhelia a interesting product with interesting new features . He questioned the ability of Matrox to mass-produce the chip at high clock frequencies as it's .15um and over 80 million transistors (Matrox is targeting 220mhz as of this writing fyi) .
7. Brian made a further comment that's interesting: Problem with Parhelia, is that it's still a DX8 part. This fall , as you know Microsoft will release DirectX9 and you're either DX9 or you're not this fall.
One could infer some things from this comment, but Brian didn't specifically mention if their next product is DX9 or not.
At this point, I had some technical questions and Brian went looking for someone to answer them . He found Tony Tamasi, Nvidia's Director of Product Development .
8. Talked a bit about anisotropic filtering. Tony said "ATI only anisos about 10% of the given screen at a time, while Nvidia does the whole scene. Different methods and our image quality with aniso is superior" . He didn't call ATI's method rip-mapping btw but similar to it.
9 N-Patches Nvidia will likely include N-Patches as a subset of some other HOS implementation, much like they did with EMBM and Pixel shaders.
10 FSAA- They want to not lose speed with it enabled. Will likely increase number of samples in the future
11. Tony made a interesting quote " Last year we did a demo of the Final Fantasy Movie. The things that were cut down were the resolution and pixel shader effects. By the end of this year we're likely to be able to render the movie with all of the pixel shader effects"
In conclusion, while my meeting with Nvidia didn't go too far into the future, it did get me more than a little excited about it. It was interesting and different to talk to Brian in person for more than the few minutes we usually chat or email about. Nvidia is one of the biggest driving forces in computer graphics today, if not THE biggest.
Nvidia now has around 45% total graphics marketshare in the PC market (including integrated, desktop, mobile) . That's an amazing growth for this company that only 9 years ago was fighting for it's survival with the release of NV1.
...but still...it seems like it was almost yesterday when I was involved in discussions surrounding the pros and cons of the Diamond Edge 3D (NV-1), vs. the Creative Labs 3D Blaster (3D Labs Gaming Glint) 
