I spent a decent amount of time at PAX talking to people at both the NVIDIA and AMD/ATI booths.  This event was undoubtedly dominated by nVidia, since they were using it as the launch event of the new GTX 470 and 480 series of video cards.  Here is what I gathered from the two booths.

The NVIDIA GTX 480s were on display all over the damn place.  Naturally they were in the NVIDIA booth, but they also had a notable presence in the free play area (which I was able to test myself).  NVIDIA also had a huge presentation in the main theater for their launch (video to be posted later).

I have to admit, being a complete amateur at this whole thing, I totally failed to have my voice recorder (which was in my camera bag the whole time, though I totally forgot about it until Saturday night) or my camcorder ready.  It was a learning experience to be sure.  Anyway, the gentleman I spoke to was one of their engineers.  He showed off both the 3D capabilities of the 480 and the intense physics processing it does in real time.  They had a rocket sled demo (which will ship with every 400 series card) that was actually very impressive.  I could have sat down and fooled around with that for hours.  I’ll start with the 3D.

Rocket Sled

This isn’t your typical 3D that you might be accustomed to from Disney World or the movies.  Most 3D in my experience has been the passive type, where the glasses force your eyes to focus separately from one another on a double image displayed on the screen.  These generally make the image pop out of the screen toward you, and give a great many people headaches after a short time.  This system, however, uses active glasses.  The wireless glasses actually have a shutter effect that syncs with the refresh rate of the monitor.  The shutters alternate from one eye to the other very quickly, with each one doing about 60 frames per second.  This is combined with a 120 Hz monitor and a 400 series card, which alternates images every other frame.  Think of it this way: one frame syncs with your left eye, while the next frame is shifted slightly to the side and syncs with the right eye.  This all happens so quickly your eye can’t actually see the shutters (and looking at the monitor without glasses, it still looks like the old double image we’re used to because of the high frame rates).  The effect is also like looking through a window into the game world, instead of the world popping out at you.

Personally, I was very impressed by the effect.  The three of us not only saw the demo in action, but also actually got to sit down in the free play arena on a trio of 3D-equipped Alienware machines for probably a half hour or so to play Bad Company 2.  The demo was high quality animation and looked quite nice, but the truly impressive part was that the video card was capable of rendering Bad Company 2 in 3D in real time.  We have to consider that it’s basically pumping out 120 frames per second or so in order to create the proper 3D effect.  Not only did it do so flawlessly, but all of the in-game objects, from trees to Bradleys, looked to be in the proper perspectives and proportions.  It actually made it possible to estimate (roughly) how far away your targets or objects are just by looking at them.  The gameplay obviously doesn’t take much advantage of this unique ability (up until these cards come out, we’re all still playing in 2 dimensions after all), but I thought it was pretty impressive (Mack and Squid were less enthused).  I only have two relatively minor gripes.  The first is that the HUD is still 2D.  This would be fine, except when game messages pop up in BC2 they seem like they’re too close to your eyes and they’re difficult to focus on.  This is something that could probably be tweaked out with a patch, but they should be rendered so that they sit just back from the plane of the screen.  The other issue was that the weapon your character is holding is 3D, but it doesn’t properly interact with objects when you get very close.  I was hiding behind a rock, and the perspective of my weapon told me it should be pressed up against the rock or physically in it, but it wasn’t.  It kinda made my brain hurt.  That’s something that will need to be addressed somehow.  I would be less taken out of the experience if the gun clipped through the rock than working the way it did.

The physics capabilities of the new cards are no less impressive.  We saw some of this on display in the demo, when the rocket sled speeds by a house so fast the house flies apart (it looks like those black and white videos of a nuclear test blast hitting a wood structure).  The demo also allows you to switch into a wire frame mode to see all the different vectors and forces that are working on one another.  Even sitting stationary on the rails, you can tell the rocket sled is not terribly stable.  Want to have a bit more fun?  The demo allows the user to fire chickens at the sled to damage it in multiple ways.  That usually ends in disaster very quickly, but it’s a very entertaining disaster.  At the NVIDIA unveiling (which we have some video of, but it will probably be a year or two before I can get it uploaded on this lousy internet connection) they demonstrated the number of physical objects that can be created and tracked by the card using PhysX.  Now, I’m not a huge fan of closed technologies like PhysX just because they force developers to make a decision as to what system they’ll use, and those without the hardware don’t get the software feature.  But when you see a video card simultaneously render 1 million objects, each with their own physics, in full 3D, you can’t help but let loose an “ooh” or an “ahh.”

Rocket Sled Demo

So how much will these little dandies run you?  Both the unveiling event and the engineer we spoke to at the booth (I don’t remember his name.  Epic reporter fail) indicated the 480 will be around $480 and the 470 will be around $350 or so.  This is about where I figured they would be, based on previous video card releases of this type from both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.  If you head over to Tom’s Hardware, you can see some real world benchmarks.  On the whole, it looks like it doesn’t match up to AMD’s flagship cards (though the 5970 is considerably more expensive).  However, the article posted by Tom’s hasn’t done anything with 3D yet, and it doesn’t appear they’ve tried the multiple monitor support (I’m not sure if the 400 series supports 3 monitors in standard mode or 3D only, but I assume it can do both).  But of course, the card is only part of the story.  You will also need a 3D monitor (about $300, and you can do up to three) and the glasses (the kit is $200 from NVIDIA’s site).  NVIDIA’s compatibility page also claims that GeForce 9xxx series cards will support 3D gaming, but until someone benchmarks these cards, I wouldn’t spring for glasses just yet.  I’ve only seen this tech on the 400 series and I know it works with them.