Tuesday, October 21, 2003 was NVIDIA's 1rst Annual Editor's Day in downtown San Francisco, USA.  The event was well attended by the gaming press from all over the world, as well as a small gathering of developers including Epic, Gearbox, and id Software, showing off some of their latest builds, and several of NVIDIA's engineers giving presentations and fielding questions.  What we thought was to be the announcements of the NV36 and NV38 turned out to be NVIDIA clearing up some misinformation about its DX9 implementation, driver architecture, and its efforts to work with game developers to wring out the best performance out of its GeForce FX GPUs.

It was nice to see such a large company as NVIDIA being open and honest in answering a lot of tough questions about performance, visual quality, and certain optimizations in their drivers.  I have to give NVIDIA credit: they packed a room full of aggressive (if not downright hostile at times) editors asking some really tough questions.  They did give out lots and lots of useful interesting information, and the coffee was good and plentiful.

In a nice 'fireside' chat with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and id Software's Todd Hollenshead over lunch, we all learned about NVIDIA's future plans in other fields not related to video cards.  Mr. Huang was very excited by the chipset market and the integrated graphics market.  Id Software is definitely backing NVIDIA, by using the GeForce FX in all of its development machines, despite DOOM 3's use of the OpenGL API in the new engine.  We were surprised to learn that there is as hard coded limit of 60FPS for DOOM 3.  I don't think any current generation of GPU can reach that limit, but perhaps when NV50 arrives we'll see those kinds of numbers from the DOOM 3 engine.

Also on hand was Dean Lester, General Manager of Microsoft's Graphics and Gaming Technology division, discussing all things Windows XP, DirectX, and a pep rally for gaming.  There wasn't much to be said about DX 10.0, or about Longhorn.  Microsoft assures us that whenever Longhorn decides to ship, it will be the best platform for PC gaming yet.

Panel Discussions 

In a brief summary, some of the major panel discussions revolved around PS 2.0 programs, floating point precision and High Dynamic Range Lighting in their DX9 implementation, a new driver optimization scheme, and increased developer relations.  On hand were six NVIDIA personnel, Kurt Akeley (CTO), David Kirk (Chief Scientist), Dwight Diercks (VP of Software Engineering), and Nick Trantos (Director of Software Engineering).  Also in the audience and generally floating around were representatives from Epic Games, id Software, UbiSoft, Gearbox, and a few others.  It was a very informative set of presentations, that all went on without a hitch, thanks to some great behind-the-scenes NVIDIA people.

I just wish they'd do another video about FlowFX.

Next page please :)