NVidia conference And GDC written by phU|CrUM - official GDC web page
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Well, after a little time to recover from the drive back to Sacramento from San Jose, I think it's about time to tell yah what went on :)
I arrived at the Fairmont Hotel around 8:20AM and was greated by many happy NVidia employees. After I got my name tag I helped myself to some breakfast that NVidia had set out for all of us. After a
twiddleing my thumbs for a little bit Jack "=WCE= Blister" and Ryan "[WCE] Zero" show up. We say our hellos and they take me over to see our NVidia rep so I can get my free pass that allows me to get into the Game Developers Conference.
Once the presentation of the new NVidia boards started I was stoked. All of the real time renderings that they showed us looked like nothing I have seen before (especially the Dawn demo, hubba hubba). The CEO talked for a little bit on how they got to where the company is now in their 10 year existance. Then the technical stuff came along. The one thing that caught my eye was the DX9 for $79.00. Or in other words the low end GeforceFX card was only going to be $79.00! Before your jump to conclusions this aint no "MX" version of the GeforceFX eather! In the benchmark comparisons they showed us the FX5200 (I believe that was the number) our preformed the Ti4200 by two fold! Also all the realtime renderings done with this card kicked as much ass as the two higher end cards. The whole FX line uses the same GPU. Finally the consumer will be able to have kick ass graphics in their rigs without having to spend $300.00 for a video card or put up with lackluster performance cards such as the MX series. Towards the end of the presentation they gave us a sneak peak of a new concept GPU by running a demo with not only 1... nor 2... nor 3 but 4, yes count them FOUR realtime rendered Dawn's. That was simply amazing.
After the conference the three of us headed outside and started to walk to the convention center to wander around GDC and low and behold... what did our eyes see? A neon green double decker bus with nVidia logos and a huge portrait of Dawn on the side. So while we are taking many pictures the driver informs us that this is a free shuttle to the convention center where the GDC is being held. Us being the lazy young lads we are we accepted the ride and were givin' a nice cold bottle of Bawls as we boarded.
Once we got to the convention center we made our way inside and stood in line to redeem our free passes to the expo for some cool lanyards with our name and what not in them :) After that we began our sheraid of being game developers for the sole purpose of getting free swag! Along the way we saw alot of cool stuff consisting of all the ATI and NVidia stuff. We got to play the beta of Tron 2.0 and let me say the lightcycle level kicks ass... even though I suck at it :) There were also a lot of cool Maya demo's. Unfortunately I didn't get to see them all.
The three of us defiantly had A LOT of fun today! Ryan and Jack took alot of photos that I'm sure they will gladly share with us all when they get a chance. I just want to say thanks to JAG and our NVidia rep for making this happen. It was defiantly worth the driver to the bay area!
In closing I will leave you with a few top 5 lists.
TOP 5 SWAG ITEMS
1) Plastic sword from "Testing Testing"
2) Glowing and blinking pen from Intel
3) The "dustbuster" shirt from ATI
4) The other shirt from ATI
5) NVidia pen
TOP 5 GOOD THINGS
1) The Dawn demos
2) Seeing Adam Sessler (from TechTV)
3) Free breakfast
4) Free swag
5) Free Bawls!
TOP 5 BAD THINGS
1) No one dressed up as dawn :(
2) No gamer babes like you see at E3
3) No free hardware (we were all hoping but truly believed we wouldn't get free hardware...)
4) Epic games for not letting us view their game engine
5) Did I mention no one dressed up as dawn? :-p
P.S. If you your asking yourself, "Who is this Dawn chick he keeps talking about?" Well, she is the attractive pixie you see all over the GeforceFX ads :)
NVidia conference And GDC written by Zero - official GDC web page
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Ok, here is my addition to Chris's nice little commentary... after Chris left me and Jack roamed around...a bit more then around 5 or so Jack decided to leave... so i hitched a ride to my car dump my stuff... and decided last min that i would go back...so i walked back...
By then things were slowing down cause the place closed at 6:30 or so... so i went to one of NVidia's booths where Phil our contact was there with a bunch of other folks tossing beer warmers and those little glow discs.
After that, NVidia served free beer on the floor.. and were promoting thier booth Crawl which consisted of 5 bars in the local area and they were handing out flyers for free drinks....i got a stack ... a big stack... so then I proceeded to thank Phil for everything and that would see him later at the Crawl.
so went out to the bars...got buzzzed then came home.
Friday i got up ... and headed on out to the GDC again. At 1:00 PM I met up with Phil and had lunch with him. We talked about LAN's and other various things. He asked me about Jaguar LAN Fest and how things were conducted. I basically told him the truth. That the Jag lans were tip top and very well put together with good people. After about two hours he had to head back , the best part... lunch... was on nvidia... gotta luv that.
So then I went back.. sat in on some public work shops and checked out some other things I hadnt in the last day.
All and all.. this was a fun time with some good people. And here are all the crappy photos I took the two days... (Pictures)
Anyway... hope to see you all in a couple of weekends. GAME ON!
