Ok, I'm back.
I ended up with a bad seating arrangement far from stage, a friend of mine who was supposed to go with me who could hold onto my camera equipment and help me change lenses and upload pictures in-turn during the event ended up not going. So I was not able to watch the event, take pictures, dump them, and blog them on my notebook, too much equipment to fumble with with one person.
That said, the event was disappointing anyway, not from a hardware perspective, but from a "unseen scooped footage you have to see" perspective as well as a "juicy technical details perspective." In previous years, I was able to get advanced shakycam footage of new 3D engines days in advance of official trailers, but this year, there's pretty much nothing to see: Quake Wars, Worlds of Conflict, and Crysis demoed, but the footage is nothing we haven't seen already, moreover NVidia is putting most of the footage from direct feeds up today or tommorow.
When I first started attending NVidia and ATI launch events, they were relatively small, VIP-only affairs, open to developers, partners, and press, so the launch presentations were much more "techie", went into more detail, and concentrated on GPU. In recent years however, ATI, and especially NVidia, had turned these events essentially into teenager infested LAN gameshows with a GPU press-event as a mere side show. As a result of this emphasis on consumers/gamers, the presentations have become shorter on technical details, and heavier on fluff. (Granted, they now have "Editors Day", but I'm not an editor. In the past, my secret decoder ring to get into Editor Day style stuff was development work I was doing.)
Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, it also happened to COMDEX, CES, and other industry events. Over time, the level of gimmicks, booth babes, rock music volume, etc gets cranked up, overwhelming the senses, but making less sense.
I will blog more later about specific stories and events that happened during the presentation, and see what, if any photos and videos I took are worth posting. I would recommend ignoring pretty much every other website and blog, and going to the only site where you'll get a true, in-depth GPU breakdown, Beyond3D -- G80 Architecture Breakdown (well, I do not want to disparage 3DCenter, which is very good too, but I don't speak German)
Anyway, my apologies for getting your hopes up for real time "can't see it anywhere else" info and photos from the launch. NVidia didn't really have any blockbuster game demos this year (like the UE3 footage last year), and spent fully half the presentation or more on the launch of the 680a/i chipsets.
-DC
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Tommorow, November 8
Check back tommorow during and after 11am PST. I will be uploading information, photos, and video during or after the event, depending on wireless access.
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