NVIDIA nTerresting News 26-June-2010

In This Issue:

• NASCAR's Daytona night race on July 3^rd with be the first ever live 3D stream that makes use of the NVIDIA 3D Vision with the Microsoft Silverlight streaming video player.
• NVIDIA was number 48 on Bloomberg Businessweek's list of the top 50 performing stocks of the past five years.
• GeForce 480 GTX and 470 are great in SLI mode, and 3D Vision Surround is another reason that SLI rocks.
• Toshiba celebrated 25 years in notebook business with new products featuring NVIDIA technology, including: Optimus, 3D Vision and Tegra 250.
• Mafia 2 and Final Fantasy XVI use ‘Graphics Plus' to give gamers a better experience.
• Cool companies doing cool things with GPUs are coming to the Emerging Companies Summit.

NASCAR in 3D

NASCAR, Turner Broadcasting and NVIDIA are teaming up to bring 3D Vision owners a treat. The July 3 NASCAR Race at Daytona will be broadcast in 3D and will feature live streaming in 3D over the web.

The 3D production will be made available through TNT RaceBuddy on NASCAR.COM as well as through DirecTV, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks and will complement a special television presentation on TNT, highlighted by the network's groundbreaking signature Wide Open format.

This is the first ever live 3D stream that makes use of the NVIDIA 3D Vision with Silverlight streaming video player. NVIDIA worked in conjunction with Microsoft and iStreamPlanet to integrate these technologies in order to create a seamless stereoscopic 3D experience viewable online with a 3D Vision PC. The end result is a rich media player located on Nascar.com with an integrated interactive leader board and advertising in the form of pre-rolls with companion ads.

To watch the race in 3D, you need NVIDIA 3D Vision, so to make it easier on the pocket book we just launched a limited time offer of $25 off NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses.

Another Top 50

This week Bloomberg Businessweek announced their list of the top 50 performing stocks of the past five years. NVIDIA was #48.

The computer-graphics chipmaker has long dominated the high end of its market. But NVIDIA lost money in its 2010 fiscal year, ending Jan. 31. (Semiconductor industry revenues dipped by 9 percent in the 2009 calendar year.) Co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang faces brutal competition from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel in the graphics market, but he's finding new customers among makers of high-performance computers that use his chips to supercharge their powerful machines.

In tough times, great technology and a solid business plan makes a big difference.

SLI, Still Rocks

SLI has long been the favorite of the enthusiast gamers because it offers big jumps in performance and superior game support when compared to the competition. But with 3D Vision Surround on the horizon, NVIDIA has upped the ante for SLI.

Our SLI testing with the GTX 480 and GTX 470 proved that NVIDIA has spent some time with the hardware and driver to tweak for incredible multi-GPU scaling - we saw as much as 87% scaling in some of our real-world gaming scenarios and even witnessed a good amount of scaling at resolutions as low as 1680x1050. That scaling performance will come in very handy for SLI users that plan on taking NVIDIA up on its offer for NVIDIA Surround or NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround when it is available later this summer.

3D Vision Surround let's you span games across three monitors in full 3D Stereo for an incredibly immersive gaming experience. 3D Vision Surround will be available later in the Summer for both GTX 400 Series and GTX 200 Series GPUs.

Toshiba 25 years for Notebooks

This week Toshiba celebrated 25 years in the notebook business and to hit 25 with a bang they turned to NVIDIA technology to make their products stand out. First they announced a laptop with 3D Vision. Then they announced two Optimus notebooks. And for the grand finale, they announced the AC100-powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 250.

The unit can reportedly remain in standby mode for up to a full week and the 10.1" display is no smaller than the average netbook... Even under duress, Toshiba claims that the AC100 will only need to see an AC port every eight hours.

Congratulations Toshiba!

Killer Games Coming this Summer With ‘Graphics Plus'

Two highly anticipated games coming this summer are Mafia 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. Great news for 3D owners is that Mafia 2 takes full advantage of NVIDIA's ‘graphics plus', using PhysX and 3D Vision to stand out from the crowd. Take a look at Mafia 2 on Italian TV (0:00 - 2:22 for comments to the 3D Vision Event and 2:22 - 4:49 for comments on Mafia 2 and 3D Vision/PhysX)

Square-Enix recently showed off Final Fantasy XIV in glorious NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround.

What's got me most excited, you ask? The impressive tech demonstration using NVIDIA's 3D Vision created an immersive MMO world that's unlike anything I've experienced.

If there's one genre that doesn't need the extra boost in immersive environments, it would be the MMORPG space. Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest have proved that MMO developers are more akin to digitized drug dealers than simple entertainment engineers. But when I took those first 3D steps into the world of Eorzea in FFXIV, I felt that 3D and MMOs were destined for each other far more than any racing or FPS game could ever hope to be. As I walked across a wooden bridge in one of the towns I was able to look down below hundreds feet into the rest of the city, giving the area a feeling of depth and tangibility that qualitatively enhanced my environmental experience

One thing that sets NVIDIA apart from the competition is the way we push innovative technologies forward to make games better. We can only do this because we have arguably the best developer relations team in the industry.

ECS 2010: Ready to share your breakthrough work with GPUs?

Are you a start-up doing amazing work that shows off the power of the GPU? Want to tell your story to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, analysts and others in the GPU computing ecosystem? Well, the annual Emerging Companies Summit (ECS) 2010 is calling your name.

ECS gives the world's top start-ups the chance to show off GPU-enabled applications and technologies that solve visual and high-performance computing challenges. The summit will be held Sept. 21-23 in San Jose, California, and is a key part of NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC). In 2009, ECS featured presentations by 60 emerging companies from 15 different countries.

This year's ECS will feature:

• Panel discussions on "Computer Vision on GPUs" and "Creating Businesses Through Disruptive Industry Changes"
• A "fireside chat" with Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's president and CEO, moderated by Quentin Hardy, national editor at Forbes magazine
• "CEO on Stage," where select start-up CEOs will interact with a panel of industry analysts, investors and technology leaders

To submit your proposal for "CEO on Stage," see the Call for Emerging Companies CEO on Stage. To stay up to date on GTC 2010, visit the GTC 2010 website, follow the GTC blog RSS feed, sign up for the GTC 2010 mailing list or join the GTC Facebook fan page.