[nVidia] E3 Notes

NVIDIA's booth was an interesting appointment only area with computers and Xboxes all over the general area. The following games were on display - Unreal Tournament 2003, Project Gotham Racing, Counter-Strike, Condition Zero, EarthWeb, Tomb Raider 4, and Sea Dogs 2.

After Brian completed his previous appointment, we headed off looking for a conference room. While all the rooms were occupied, we found a corner to talk and discussed the following.

• The GeForce4 Ti 4200 was released recently. With a MSRP of around $179, it brings GeForce4 features and great performance to the mainstream market. Expect a VisionTek 128MB GeForce4 Ti 4200 review from me very soon.
• NVIDIA owns around 2-3% of the chipset market.
• NVIDIA is working on all kinds of 3D chips. While a PDA chip was not specifically mentioned, it's a logical next step. In the future - core logic and the successor to the nForce.
• NVIDIA's very interested in a Pentium 4 bus license of course. (Public statements by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reveal that the main obstacle to securing a license is the high per chip fee Intel is asking for and competing with Intel's own chipsets).
• We talked in general terms about the future. AGP 8X and DirectX 9 are likely to be the big things pushed this fall.
• Brian called Parhelia an 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 contains over 80 million transistors. (As of this report, Matrox is targeting a core speed of 220MHz).
• Brian made a further comment that's interesting - problem with Parhelia is that it's still a DirectX 8 part. This fall, Microsoft will release DirectX 9 and you're either DirectX 9 or you're not. One could infer some things from this comment, but Brian didn't specifically mention if their next product is DirectX 9 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.

• 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, but similar to it.
• NVIDIA will likely include N-Patches as a subset of some other high order surface implementation, much like they did with environmental bump mapping and pixel shaders.
• No loss in performance with antialiasing enabled and a likely increase in the number of samples in the future.
• 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 market share in the PC market (including integrated, desktop and mobile). That's amazing growth for a company that only seven years ago was fighting for it's survival with the release of NV1.