Nvidia At E3 2011

Day 1 of E3 2011 went off with a bang and whilst everyone was still reeling from the revelations of the Nintendo conference, we went to visit the Nvidia booth down in the concourse hall to discuss a number of hot gaming topics including dual GPU’s, quad SLI, tablet gaming and 3D Vision.

We caught up with director of marketing, Michael DeNefffe, to see what Nvidia are up to at E3 2011. First on the agenda was 3D! Nvidia have always championed 3D gaming with their 3D Vision product/service, so we were keen to find out where 3D is going in the future, near and far. Straight away Michael admited that 3D is not a full time thing for gaming, no one really plays competitively with the 3D turned, a pro StarCraft II gamer will never be caught wearing a pair of stereoscopic glasses in their bedroom let alone at a tournament. Whilst 3D may not give a competitive edge, it most certainly can enhance a gaming experience, turning each session into an ‘event’. If you have played well supported 3D titles such as Batman: Arkham Asylum or Metro 2033 then you know what we are talking about.

If you are looking to enter the realm of 3D then you have a lot of choice and perhaps a lot of confusion too. If you are going for a glasses package then you will need to lay out some considerable dough for multiple units, so you can share the experience with friends and family. But which platform do you buy for? At the moment, 3D glasses have very little cross platform compatibility, therefore if you have a pair of Nvidia 3D Vision glasses and your friend is using one of Sony’s setups then you cannot just pop round, sync your glasses and join in on the action. This is a real sticking point, a sticking point which could be remedied in the near future.

We asked the question; will 3D glasses ever be cross platform so consumers like us only need one pair of the expensive glasses to enjoy 3D on our PC, consoles and tv? The simple answer is yes. Active shutter glasses need to contact IR emitters to make a connection and sync with 3D devices, and at the moment each device uses its own frequency to achieve this sync. All it really takes is for a quick frequency change and you could conceivably use your Nvidia glasses on Sony’s latest 3D setup; think universal remote.

DeNeffe theorises that we are only 6 months away from using our glasses across multiple 3D platforms, a goal which will likely be achieved by those platforms collaborating and sharing information.

To round off our booth tour we were shown a selection of tablets running various android operating systems. Nvidia say that tablet gaming can bridge the gap between consoles and computers, and that some of the latest gaming tablets are running dual core graphics processors with quad core models coming soon. The end result is a pretty powerful gaming machine which can be transfered to your HDTV running at full 1080p resolution. Throw a controller into the mix and you have a compelling argument for a console replacement. Developers would of course have to support the platform, and tablets would need to move even further forward than they have already, which is not inconceivable as they iterate rather fast making big improvements in the process.

Only time will tell but we have a sneaky feeling that we will be sticking with our consoles and PC’s for a while yet.