Nvidia Meeting

Nice lights

Our next meeting of the day was with Nvidia PR man, Derek Perez. We did our best to hide all the 3dfx logos before walking into the Nvidia meeting room at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). Nvidia went for the flashy, nightclub type look; the room was dimly lit and colored spotlights providing interesting moving patterns on the floor. Derek was running a little late (everyone's late on the first day), so we spent a little time looking at all the displays.

Nvidia set up several demonstration units throughout the room, showing off their GeForce, Quadro, and Vanta cards. The first demo unit we saw was extremely impressive. The GeForce powered demo station was playing an HDTV video feed at full speed off the hard disk. We all had one of those "I want that!" type feelings. Yes, the GeForce sure can do HDTV. It's too bad you still need a TV card with an HDTV decoder to get the feed, but at least you know the GeForce can handle the output.

Anything else?

The Quadro demo station was also impressive. The system was running through the CAD demo pretty darn quick. We gave a Vanta station a cursory glance (actually, we kind of looked away when someone told us it was a Vanta). Hey, we're not businessmen; we're hardcore gamers. We spent a little extra time looking at the Kryotech Athlon 1GHz SuperG system running Unreal Tournament on the GeForce.

The last demo station to grab our attention was the mug making unit. Nvidia had a system up dedicated to putting your picture on an Nvidia mug. Of course, we weren't very interested in the mug -we were more interested in the open Internet Explorer window on the desktop. Internet access? Could someone really suffer from internet withdrawal after just 12 hours? Maybe. Novell had a couple booths with lines of systems offering convention attendees internet access for e-mail and other internet activities. Unfortunately, there was always a line for use of these stations. Now, Nvidia had a nice empty little station in the back with a brower window open…

• Me: Excuse me, does this machine have internet access?
• Nvidia guy: Yes it does.
• Me: Do you mind if I…
• Nvidia guy: Sure, go ahead. Just don't close the browser window. (I guess it was related to the mug making in some way.)
• Me: Thanks!

We were all anxious to check the Gamers.com site, because the preview was scheduled to go up that morning. The site was up, and we started giving the Nvidia guys a little Gamers.com tour. Derek showed up at about this time, and we started an informal meeting.