Thought I would upload a few pictures from the PAXEast event. And talk a bit of what I saw. I hope its not to much, but thought some people might be interested as I was.
The event was hosted by Drew Henry, General Manager, GeForce GPUs
Started out by talking about PC Gaming and how they were out to make a great cards for great gamers, and a big introduction to the GTX 480 and GTX 470, normal PR stuff. But I did like this comparison of GTX 4XX die to that of 4 Core i7 CPU's being the same size !
Nothing was said about ATI or about their cards beyond saying that Nvidia was out to build a next gen card and thus made a brand new arch. The only performance slide shown was this one comparing a GTX 480 to a GTX 285 (and thats 2X in the upper corner).
They really wanted to point out it was twice as fast as last generation.
Then came the part of the show I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. To promote the GTX 480 and 470 Nvidia came up with a new slogan. and ... wait for it ... here it is!
Maybe I am dead in side but PR like this has never worked for me, maybe it works on the general public though.
We were all given 3d glasses (2 of them had green paint on them, people who had them won a GTX 480) and so following the introduction the event went 3D.
Next came a short showing of BF:BC2 in Stereo 3D at about 30fps, Nvidia also showed off a Need for Speed Car customizer using Ray Tracing that will come with every GTX 480 and 470 sold. Looked amazing, seemed to be running at around 2fps.
The show wrapped up with a bit of fooling around with the Rocked Sled demo they had shown before and Metro 2033 in Stereo 3D at somewhat playable FPS, 30fps in Metro at best. Then they showed World of Warcraft in Stereo 3D at maybe 10-15fps, it was kinda sad to see.
Beyond the event I found a lot of GTX 480's on the exhibit floor, from EVGA, PNY, and Galaxy to name a few. The Nvidia booth was filled with 480 SLI systems by Maingear.
It was a well done event, nothing shown was that amazing when really examined, but the overall feel was impressive. It was cool to see BF:BC2 and Metro 2033 in 3D. Nvidia also had a Stereo 3D demo up of Just Cause 2 which was amazing, good frame rate too, though settings looked to be middle of the road. As well as one with Need for Speed: SHIFT.
I am unsure what I think about the slogan, CRANK THAT S#!T UP did nothing to sway me and seemed like something a High School Student would be told by his friends before doing something that ends up on YouTube.
On a side note, I also spent some time with one of the guys at the Nvidia booth who said he was in charge of the thermals and cooling. After a bit of prying he made it very clear to me that the heat sink on the GTX 480 is as big as they could make it and as efficient as possible. He seemed to extremely proud of what he had made, and after reading the reviews I see why. There is a LOT of heat to get rid of.
Overall, I will be sticking with my 5770's until I can pick myself up a 5870 2gig card, Fermi is overall, a bit of a no show.
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