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:

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Today, the day before Computex 2014 officially starts, Nvidia held their very first Gamer’s Day across the street from Taipei’s famous Taipei 101 at ATT 4 Fun’s 7th floor Show Box. The company had trucks driving around the area making the public and Computex attendees alike aware of the all-day festivities which started at 11 am and went til 7 pm.

While we didn’t get a chance to stay for the whole event, we did spend quite a bit of time walking around the venue and watching the festivities unfold, mostly in Mandarin. The focal point of the event was the professional League of Legends tournament being held on the main stage with commentators and $10,000 USD prize. There were also a series of amateur gamers playing League of Legends on separate machines. All of the gaming machines for the day with the exception of the three 4K gaming display were powered by MSI and their logo was plastered all over the event.

The Gamer’s Day also had a series of giveaways that would go on over the course of the day and included Nvidia-powered devices like a Gigabyte Tegra Note 7 as well as Nvidia SHIELDs. The last and ultimate giveaway for the day, at the end, was one GeForce GTX Titan Z. To do the math, this card is $3,000 USD and would come out to about 90,000 NTD (New Taiwanese Dollars), an even more daunting sounding price. According to Nvidia’s figures, they had around 1,500 people pre-register for the all day Gamer’s Day event. While we didn’t get any exact figures of how many people attended Nvidia’s Gamer’s Day, I can say with absolute certainty that their numbers were well into the high hundreds as people came and went over the course of the day.

Nvidia was also showing off a multitude of new G-Sync monitors from their partners including Acer’s 4K G-Sync monitor, ASUS’ 2560×1440 G-Sync monitor as well as G-Sync monitors from AOC and Phillips.

Nvidia chose to do a Gamer’s Day instead of having a booth on the show floor this year and it isn’t going to be the last time they do it either. Because at E3, Nvidia has already announced similar plans to forego a booth on the show floor and to build a Gamer’s Day-like experience outside of the convention center in order to make themselves more accessible to the public and local gamers. Nvidia is still going to have to pay the convention organizers at both events in order to do what they’re doing, but it alos

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As many of you may already know, AMD has proposed a standard unofficially dubbed FreeSync as a way to allow monitors to sync with graphics cards in a way that allows them not to render half frames and to sync the refresh rate of the monitor with the frame rate of the GPU. This standard is designed to be a ‘free’ alternative to Nvidia’s announced G-Sync which will only work with Nvidia’s own GPUs and monitor hardware. AMD’s solution is designed to be more ‘open’ and ‘free’ meaning that you don’t have to necessarily commit to a specific brand of graphics card or monitor. While I haven’t seen FreeSync, I have seen G-Sync and I can tell you that the experience without a doubt elevates the quality of gaming without a doubt in my mind.

Now, there has recently been a rumor circulating around the press for the past few days about the fact that AMD’s dubbed FreeSync standard has been ratified by VESA and will become part of the DisplayPort standard. We did some digging around and managed to get some pretty definitive answers about this new standard that will be part of DisplayPort 1.2a. We were told that while the name itself isn’t too bad, there is a strong likelihood that when the new standard is officially announced as part of DisplayPort  that it’ll lose its current name.  We were also told that there’s a strong likelihood that we could see it as soon as May, shortly before VESA makes another announcement.

That announcement will precede an even bigger one, in the announcement of DisplayPort 1.3. For those unfamiliar with DisplayPort 1.3, we wrote a pretty lengthy exclusive article back in December detailing all of the aspects of DisplayPort 1.3, however, once FreeSync gets integrated into 1.2a, that feature will also be added to 1.3 by default. I suspect that because of FreeSync, there may be a possibility that we could see DisplayPort 1.3 gaining faster adoption as a result of the fact that a generally lower refresh rate will allow for less power drawn by the display. In fact, one of the best applications for FreeSync in DisplayPort 1.2a and later standards will be the fact that monitors will spend less time refreshing and as a result drawing less power. Not to mention the overall experiential improvements. Additionally, it may be easier to implement things like 8K video over DisplayPort 1.3 if we know that initial testing can be done at lower refresh rates than 60 Hz. Hopefully they’ve resolved the cable bandwidth issue with DisplayPort 1.3, and if we find out anything new about FreeSync or DisplayPort 1.3, we’ll be sure to report it to you as soon as possible.

The expectation is that DisplayPort 1.3 will be announced sometime in late Q2 or early Q3, which leaves DisplayPort 1.2 to come anywhere between that time and now.

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