NVISION '08 - What to Expect

Up until now, Nvidia has kept various aspects of its marketing practices in the channel. LAN parties under the GeForce LAN moniker would happen once a year or so, and press conferences would happen when necessary. This year, however, NVISION 2008 looks to unify the community and press around one all-encompassing event. NVISION will have something for everybody, from the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) and the potentially record-breaking LAN party (Guinness will be here to verify) to presentations and exhibits for HD enthusiasts to a wide variety of speeches and keynotes.

Is NVISION the new E3 ? In some ways. Nvidia is keen on demonstrating its new technology and vendors such as it are finding it more prudent to setup own-run shows instead of participating in conglomerate events. On the other hand, NVISION isn’t intended to be a big party bash, but rather a show case to demonstrate cutting edge graphics technology — and then some.

This time around, Nvidia has timed its show with a pivotal point in its strategy. As frequent Tom’s Hardware readers know, Nvidia is pushing into the general processing realm with technology like CUDA. Application acceleration on the GPU is becoming a serious topic, even more so than dedicated physics processing was when people were becoming aware of it.

The most important presentation we can look forward to is the keynote from Nvidia chairman Jen-Hsun Huang, who should shed some light on CUDA and GPU acceleration for applications, and what we should expect down the road for graphics cards. Other presenters and special guests include former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “Battlestar Galactica” star Tricia Helfer, Mythbuster stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, and Digg creator Kevin Rose.

Celebrities aside, the star of the show is still Nvidia’s graphics platforms, and with CUDA and CUDA 2.0 being aggressively pushed as of late, we should expect some sort of announcement regarding the GPU acceleration technology — as well as a possible list of supported applications. Also, it would not be a complete surprise if talk about the next generation of graphics cards came up GTX 380 anyone ?)...but that might be wishful thinking. Expect some news form the myriad of hardware developers who will also be in attendance.

More to follow shortly.