3. Lunch With Jerry, Continued

As we have seen in reviewing many systems over past few years, the graphics title for both the desktop and mobile arenas has changed hands regularly, and this will most likely continue. For now, however, the victory flag is waving over the NVIDIA camp, and they are proud of their achievements.

"At this point we have the top to bottom GeForce Go 6 family and are really excited about it. We feel that the momentum is ours to get and we will just have to see where the market plays out. Certainly in this segment, like where the XPS and the other guys play, we feel like we are doing really well. Everywhere that I have seen us go head to head with an ATI product, where the OEM says 'only one of you will win this socket,' we have won every single one. There have only been some cases where they say that 'some of our customers want both' so they offer the option. I feel like this segment is one that I think we are very strong in."

450MHz core clock speed and 550MHz GDDR3 clock speed.

A host of blockbuster DX9 titles were released last year and many more are to come in 2005. It is great to see graphics chips, especially mobile solutions, that keep up with current gaming demands. Jerry went on to address this in terms of architecture and NVIDIA's advances in Shader Model 3.0 and High Dynamic Rendering.

"The main thing is efficiency, and that is mostly from architectural changes. We have seen more DX9 games and applications, so we had a better idea on how people coded. The first thing was to design an architecture to align with it. Since we had a chance to start from scratch, it was a good opportunity to improve on the performance through efficiency. The next thing we did was not only deliver performance advancements but also feature advancements, because we work closely with all of the game developers. Many of them were looking forward to either delivering patches or games shipping out of the box with Shader Model 3 and high dynamic range lighting, color, and rendering."

The last point of interest on Jerry's tour was a stop into the land of Pure Video Technology. If there is one area that I constantly see utilized in the mobile arena on business trips, it is video playback. Long trips are made short by either working while you fly, sleeping or watching a movie.

"We are starting to see more convergence with people who like the specs from consumer electronics video playback versus a "media PC's" video playback. So, both on the desktop side and on the notebook side, we decided to invest in a piece of real estate on our chip to do more video decode and post processing. The decode offloads the CPU, which is better on power efficiency with a notebook. And on the post processing side, it will give much better quality."

He went on to say that, "just like 3D has been the roadmap for development for many years, I think that video will also be a roadmap for the future."