nVidia Coverage

nVidia is the major sponsor of QuakeCon 2004 and are footing the majority of the bill for the event so gamers from around the United States and the rest of the world need not pay a cent to play games at the convention. It is nVidia's (and the other sponsors) way of giving something back to gamers around the world for keeping them profitable.

It is clearly obvious nVidia is the biggest sponsor this year as the usual green glow is everywhere to send that subliminal message to gamers that nVidia's graphics cards are the best in the business - "The way it's meant to be played" - at least according to nVidia. I wonder what a red glow would have looked like. Maybe ATI will show us in future years.

Accordingly nVidia had the largest vendor area to show off some of their latest technologies including the 6800 Ultra and SLI. Gamers had the chance to play some new games as well as a couple unreleased games on some of the fastest hardware in the world.

This was just one of the little sections where gamers could use hardware powered by nVidia to play some games - most notable for us was the SLI section which is shown above.

Above you can see the nVidia SLI system which was powering the Doom 3 game play. nVidia had the game set at 1600 x 1200 with Ultra Quality settings with two 6800 Ultra's in SLI and it ran absolutely beautifully - nothing remotely near single digit frames per second from what I could see. We didn't get a chance to enable the com_showfps command to check frame rates but it wouldn't have mattered since Doom 3 is capped at 60 FPS anyway and I doubt we could have got away with setting up and running FRAPS.

I asked one of the nVidia reps walking around why having all this power is important when the game is capped at 60 FPS. He answered by saying when you have such extreme image quality settings you need the power of SLI to maintain FPS. He answered correctly but I was hoping he might accidentally let out pieces of information that he was not meant to - must have been the press badge…

The above shows nVidia's competition area where gamers need to try and build a system the quickest to win some prizes.