This past Thursday (September 18^th), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) hosted its GAME24 event from Hangar 8 at the Santa Monica Airport in Los Angeles. The event was billed as a “celebration of PC gaming”, and it certainly was. However, the main event was no secret to those in the press – the release of the new top end Maxwell GPUs: GTX 980 and GTX 970.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang soon took the stage to welcome the attendees and to present Maxwell and the new technologies that come with it.

Maxwell has a variety of improvements over the previous generation of GPU technology. Memory consumption has been drastically reduced, using approximately 25% less memory bandwidth on the games Nvidia tested with when comparing the GTX 980 to GTX 680.

Energy efficiency was also improved, with Nvidia boasting a 2x improvement in efficiency (measured in performance per watt as determined by frames per second).

Two interesting new software features are DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) and MFAA.

DSR is designed to be used with games that are already running at maximum visual settings and are still getting extremely high framerates. DSR uses the extra GPU horsepower to render the frames at 4K resolution and downscale them to the monitor’s native resolution, resulting in improved visual fidelity.

MFAA is a different type of anti-aliasing designed to provide higher levels of AA at a lower performance cost. Nvidia stated it as “4x MSAA Quality at 2x AA Performance”. That’s not entirely accurate as the number was compared to 4x MSAA on a GTX 680 vs 4x MFAA on a GTX 980. As seen in the slide below, going from 4x MSAA to 4x MFAA on a GTX 980 provides an increase of approximately 27%, going from 41 FPS to 52 FPS. Nevertheless, the improvement is still impressive.

Nvidia also significantly improved input lag time for the purpose of VR displays, making Oculus Rift a much more attractive product.

VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination) is a low-cost (in terms of performance) lighting technology. The results looked very good and ran in real-time. They also demonstrated a debunking of the moon landing conspiracy using VXGI lighting effects to simulate the images of the moon landing.

At the end of the presentation, the GTX 980 was launched at an MSRP of $549 and the GTX 970 at an MSRP of $329. (Check out the GTX 980 review here)

After the presentation, there was more food and drinks, as well as a variety of stations set up to try out Nvidia’s tech.

Stations included the following: three display 4K surround, Nvidia Shield gaming stations, G-Sync enabled 4K gaming stations, and most impressively – Oculus Rift testing stations utilizing Nvidia’s new input lag-reducing tech.

The Oculus Rift one was definitely the most impressive of all the demos on display. Even those prone to motion sickness have no problem enjoying games with the headset. The experience was totally immersing and very smooth. The immersion was so complete that people around me took the opportunity to take amusing photos.

Nvidia also did a massive giveaway, giving away a total of approximately 45 products. Considering the crowd appeared to be about 300 people, the opportunities to win were quite good. Even more appealing was the fact that the giveaways consisted solely of GTX 980 and 970 GPUs, 4K monitors from ASUS and Acer, and Nvidia Shield and Shield tablets. Each attendee also received free game codes for Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew. Considering the event was open for free public registration, the event was definitely worth attending.

Prior to the start of the event there was a hands-on preview of Zotac’s new GTX 980 and 970 offerings. Both product releases here and here, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but pictures of some of the new cards are below:

This post originally appeared on Bright Side of News*, VR World’s sister site.

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This past Thursday (September 18^th), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) hosted its GAME24 event from Hangar 8 at the Santa Monica Airport in Los Angeles. The event was billed as a “celebration of PC gaming”, and it certainly was. However, the main event was no secret to those in the press – the release of the new top end Maxwell GPUs: GTX 980 and GTX 970. This announcement was made in conjunction with the NDA expiry of the GTX 980 reviews, including our very own review of the GeForce GTX 980.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang soon took the stage to welcome the attendees and to present Maxwell and the new technologies that come with it.

Maxwell has a variety of improvements over the previous generation of GPU technology. Memory consumption has been drastically reduced, using approximately 25% less memory bandwidth on the games Nvidia tested with when comparing the GTX 980 to GTX 680.

Energy efficiency was also improved, with Nvidia boasting a 2x improvement in efficiency (measured in performance per watt as determined by frames per second).

Two interesting new software features are DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) and MFAA.

DSR is designed to be used with games that are already running at maximum visual settings and are still getting extremely high framerates. DSR uses the extra GPU horsepower to render the frames at 4K resolution and downscale them to the monitor’s native resolution, resulting in improved visual fidelity.

MFAA is a different type of anti-aliasing designed to provide higher levels of AA at a lower performance cost. Nvidia stated it as “4x MSAA Quality at 2x AA Performance”. That’s not entirely accurate as the number was compared to 4x MSAA on a GTX 680 vs 4x MFAA on a GTX 980. As seen in the slide below, going from 4x MSAA to 4x MFAA on a GTX 980 provides an increase of approximately 27%, going from 41 FPS to 52 FPS. Nevertheless, the improvement is still impressive.

Nvidia also significantly improved input lag time for the purpose of VR displays, making Oculus Rift a much more attractive product.

VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination) is a low-cost (in terms of performance) lighting technology. The results looked very good and ran in real-time. They also demonstrated a debunking of the moon landing conspiracy using VXGI lighting effects to simulate the images of the moon landing.

At the end of the presentation, the GTX 980 was launched at an MSRP of $549 and the GTX 970 at an MSRP of $329. (Check out the GTX 980 review here)

After the presentation, there was more food and drinks, as well as a variety of stations set up to try out Nvidia’s tech.

Stations included the following: three display 4K surround, Nvidia Shield gaming stations, G-Sync enabled 4K gaming stations, and most impressively – Oculus Rift testing stations utilizing Nvidia’s new input lag-reducing tech.

The Oculus Rift one was definitely the most impressive of all the demos on display. Even those prone to motion sickness have no problem enjoying games with the headset. The experience was totally immersing and very smooth. The immersion was so complete that people around me took the opportunity to take amusing photos.

Nvidia also did a massive giveaway, giving away a total of approximately 45 products. Considering the crowd appeared to be about 300 people, the opportunities to win were quite good. Even more appealing was the fact that the giveaways consisted solely of GTX 980 and 970 GPUs, 4K monitors from ASUS and Acer, and Nvidia Shield and Shield tablets. Each attendee also received free game codes for Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew. Considering the event was open for free public registration, the event was definitely worth attending.

Prior to the start of the event there was a hands-on preview of Zotac’s new GTX 980 and 970 offerings. Both product releases here and here, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but pictures of some of the new cards are below:

The post Nvidia Game24 Event: The Launch of GTX 980 and GTX 970 appeared first on VR World.

With Nvidia’s alleged reveal of the GTX 980 and GTX 970 said to occur later this week, we are starting to see several benchmark scores emerge online. The latest listing was found on CompuBench, an OpenCL and RenderScript benchmark that tests the parallel compute performance of GPUs.

CompuBench’s benchmark comprises of several tests, each targeting a specific area of the GPU, like physics, processing and throughput. In the face detection test, the GTX 980 and the GTX 970 received scores of 142.522 mPixels/s and 123.183 mPixels/s, outdoing AMD’s R9 290X, which managed a score of 112.814 mPixels/s.

The GTX 980 and GTX 970 continued their dominance in the physics test as well by scoring 1138.728 mInteraction/s and 1027.749 mInteraction/s respectively, which is almost twice as high as the 659.31 mInteraction/s achieved by the R9 290X.

Nvidia’s upcoming cards did not score higher than AMD’s offerings in all tests, however, as the TV-L1 Optical Flow benchmark revealed. The R9 290X scored 31.805 mPixels/s, while the GTX 980 netted 22.104 mPixels/s, and the GTX 970 18.854 mPixels/s. While the Nvidia Maxwell-based cards scored twice as high in particle simulation tests, AMD’s R9 290X managed to net a higher score in the ocean simulation test, winning out with a score of 2260.994 Frames/s over the 1679.863 Frames/s achieved by the GTX 980.

If you’re looking to get a card for mining Bitcoin, it looks like AMD is still the vendor to choose, with the R9 290X netting 692.259 mHash/s to the 531.343 mHash/s obtained by the GTX 980. The GTX 970, meanwhile, got a score of 474.153 mHash/s. These are all compute tests, and while the GTX 980 and GTX 970 seem to be able to hold their own against the best of AMD, it will be interesting to see the advantages they offer when we look at graphics benchmarks, which is what the cards will excel at. Nvidia is rumored to launch the GTX 980 and GTX 970 later this week at the Game24 gaming event, with a third video card in the series, dubbed the GTX 960 set to debut sometime next month. 

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Hardware-maker Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is planning a massive celebration for PC gaming that will span the entire globe, and they want you to be a part of it.

Nvidia’s global event is called Game24, and will feature 24-hours of uninterrupted content including dev interviews, game reveals, eSports competitions, giveaways and of course a whole ‘lotta gaming.

The “PC gaming holiday” launches on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 6PM PST, and will be held in select cities across the world such as Los Angeles, Shanghai, Stockholm and London. Attendance and registration for the show are free of charge, and you can sign-up here.

Nvidia’s gaming event will start on September 18 and will run for a full 24-hours of interviews, eSports competitions, giveaways and game reveals.

Below you can find a list of show locations in the United States:

• Los Angeles:  Hangar 8, 3021 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, California.
• Chicago: Ignite Gaming Lounge, 3341 N. Elston Ave., Chicago, Illinois.
• Indianapolis: eBash Indianapolis Video Game Center, 6609 East 82nd St., Indianapolis, Indiana.
• Mission Viejo, California: 27741 Crown Valley Pkwy, Ste. 223, Mission Viejo, California.

Continuous livestreams will be broadcasted around-the-clock for but it seems that you’ll need to sign-up for those as well.

It’ll be interesting to see what reveals that Nvidia’s show partners have planned, and we may even see some GPU/hardware announcements along the way. Also if Game24 turns out to be a success, it may lead to AMD countering with a mini-expo show of their own–what better way to build up hype for your hardware brand than to throw a massive PC gaming bash?

Be sure to drop by the Game24 website or check out the blog post from Nvidia’s Tom Petersen for more info on Game24.

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