Nvidia gives lowdown on gaming graphics

By Alex Villafania, hackenslash Reporter INQUIRER.net Editor's note: The article wrongly identified the Nvidia official as Mark Chen. The executive who gave the presentation was actually Davis Lin, Nvidia senior sales manager. hackenslash regrets the error. JUST shortly after processor and graphics card chip giants AMD and ATI released their Spider multimedia platform, competing graphics card company Nvidia has upped the ante by presenting their latest GeForce 8 series. Incidentally, Nvidia's Asia Pacific channel sales manager Mark Chen senior sales manager Davis Lin made direct comparisons between Nvidia’s graphics card products and those of ATI during their recent product presentation in Makati. In fact, Chen Lin even went as far as saying that AMD (which acquired ATI), is "fooling" the market, particularly with the use of Microsoft DirectX 10.1, an incremental Windows programming update. DirectX is used mainly by Microsoft Windows to run multimedia applications, particularly games. However, DirectX use caught on when Microsoft created the game console Xbox. ATI had earlier launched its graphics cards with DirectX 10.1 support, especially in its Radeon HD 3000 series. The products, which are part of AMD's Spider platform strategy, were presented to local media just recently. ATI's biggest competitor in the graphics card market is Nvidia. "There are no DirectX 10.1 applications yet," according to Chen Lin, who went on to make his point regarding the difference of using the current standard DirectX 10 and ATI's use of DirectX 10.1. PC games are perhaps the most notable users of DirectX and as such, the latest DirectX updates affect their performance. Chen Lin, on the other hand, said that there are no PC games that will be released with DirectX 10.1 as a requirement. He even listed some games and their publishers who claim they will not be coding their games in DirectX 10.1 until 2009, including Epic Games ("Unreal Tournament"), Crytek ("Crysis"), Relic Entertainment ("Company of Heroes"), and Ubisoft Motreal ("Far Cry 2"), among others. "Nvidia has already started the internal training of people so we could jump from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11," Chen Lin said. Regardless, Chen Lin went straight to talking about the new performance capabilities of their GeForce 8 graphics cards. In some demonstrations, he showcased the GeForce cards' ability to reproduce depth of field wherein objects from a distance appear blurred while objects near the camera are clearer; smoke and fog rendering; soft particle movement; motion blur; and high definition lighting. The company released the latest GeForce 8 graphics cards, particularly the 8600 GT, the 8800 GT and the 8800 Ultra, all of which use the latest PCI Express motherboard slot. The 8600 GT has a core clock speed of 540 megahertz and 256 megabytes of memory. The 8800 GT has a 600 MHz core clock speed with 512 MB of memory. The GeForce 8800 Ultra is the company's top-of-the-line graphics card, which has a 612 MHz core clock speed and 768 MB of memory. These graphics cards are also capable of HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) output for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD capable optical drives.