Event Coverage

NVIDIA Celebrates GTX 480 at NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai

By Terence Ang - 17 Apr 2010

GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival (NGF 2010)

Bringing the Fermi Architecture to Enthusiasts

NVIDIA held its highly anticipated inaugural GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival at the Super Brand Mall in Shanghai on 10 April 2010. Held over two days, the event saw Drew Henry, general manager of desktop GPU business at NVIDIA walking on stage and promoting the new GeForce GTX 480 GPU to Chinese gamers gathered on the show floor.

Drew Henry, General Manager for Desktop GPU business at NVIDIA holds up the GeForce GTX 480 card to the audience.

Here's a short video of Drew Henry highlighting some of the features behind what the GTX480 GPU can do.

The Festival included booths taken up by industry partners, including OEMs, game developers and NVIDIA-authorized board partners, as well as a centralized LAN competition area featuring games like WarCraft III and StarCraft 2 Multiplayer Beta. Of course, as the festival is being held in Shanghai, gamers were able to experience local game titles like Kingsoft's Jianxia III Online, 175PT/Object Software's MKZ, Giant's King of King III, Tencent's Alliance of Valiant Arms, Netease's Tianxia II and The9's World.

One of the key takeaways from the NVIDIA GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival was the technology demos that NVIDIA showed to the audience. Key among these was the 8 times faster tessellation performance which the GTX 480 GPU has over the competition and the ability to process 1.6 billion triangles per second. Demos showcased included realistic water effects and human hair. Another demo showed was BitSquid's Stone Giant demo, highlighting what tessellation can do for games.

One of the demos showcased to highlight tesselation performance on the GTX 480 GPU was BigSquid's Stone Giant. Here's a snapshot from the demo.

In a close-up of the fist of the Stone Giant demo, notice the flatness of the surfaces on the creature.

The reason for the flatness is because the amount of polygons is relatively small, as demonstrated in this wire frame mode.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX480 GPU chipset is able to process 1.6 billion triangles per second. This allows for extra dimensional effects like tesselation, which NVIDIA claims is 8 times faster than AMD/ATI's Radeon HD 5870.

With so many polygons, minute details like the bumps and multi-dimensional effect of objects are better highlighted. Tesselation has been used in Hollywood special effects for some time now. With the GeForce GTX480 and GTX470 GPUs, NVIDIA wants to bring it to desktop games.

The highlight of the festival was the pitting of skills in WarCraft III among some of the top Chinese gamers like Sky, Infi, TeD, Fly100% and Korean contenders like Moon, Lyn, ReMinD and FoCuS. Another highlight was a GPU overclocking contest for overclocking fans to put their skills on show.

One of the highlights of the festival was when Japanese overclocker, nicknamed "Duck" (wearing a beanie), came on stage to overclock the NVIDIA GeForce GTX4 80 GPU beyond its 700MHz default clock speed.

Well he managed to hit 900MHz at the core after cooling the GPU with liquid nitrogen. He ran 3DMark Vantage and had a GPU score of 21,508 after running both GPU Tests.

 

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