Nvidia India held the 10 Gaming Live event on June 11, 2016 at their India Headquarters in Bengaluru. The Event was an introduction and celebration of their new Pascal architecture as seen in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs. It was also livestreamed on YouTube and the videos may be found on the Nvidia India Facebook page. Cosplayer Niha Novacaine was the host of the day long show.
The event began at 10:00 am with Nvidia’s Vishal Dhupar and Vamsi Krishna revealing the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders’ Edition GPUs and giving an insight into the features of the Pascal architecture. They also delved into why Nvidia believes 10 is so important and represents ‘Gaming Perfected’. Throughout the day, Niha interviewed the India heads of Nvidia’s manufacturing partners Asus, Zotac and Gigabyte, who talked about their own custom editions in addition to the Founders’ Edition GPUs.
Nvidia had set up an Experience Zone at the venue, though the event was invite only, seeing participation mostly from Nvidia staff, channel partners, mediapersons and some select local gamers. There were three VR booths using the HTC Vive to showcase VR tech demos including climbing Everest, drawing in 3D with Tilt Brush VR and some from Valve’s The Lab VR demokit. There was also a booth dedicated to the new Ansel technology showcasing it on The Witness running on a GTX 1080 powered machine as well as some prerendered captures on phones fitted to cardboard VR kits. There was a giant GTX 1080 and some Cosplayers for taking photos with as well as a Racing chair setup with surround screens for Project Cars.
The gaming café chain LXG had brought in 6 PCs for the 3v3 Overwatch tournament, though these were in need of some dusting and sported older Maxwell GPUs. Unfortunately, since Overwatch doesn’t allow 3v3 contests, the tourney was forced to run with bots filling the balance 3 slots. LXG’s representatives seemed rather excited to be part of the event, butting in on conversations to promote their brand.
There was a Game demo booth setup with The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Doom, Tom Clancy’s The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider on display on systems powered by Thermaltake, except for an AIO PC for The Witcher. A products gallery was also set up for the Channel Partners and saw GPUs and peripherals from Asus, Gigabyte, Zotac, MSI, Coolermaster and Thermaltake on display. Coolermaster’s Master Case 5 served as the basis for the Case Mods section. Asus also held an overclocking event with LN2 overclocking for a Skylake CPU and on-air overclocking for their Strix 1080 GPU with Toolius and Darky trying to break the Unigine Heaven benchmark record.
Our reporter took the opportunity to ask Nvidia about their specific plans for the Founders Edition. We learned that the Founders Edition is the essentially the reference GPU that Nvidia want to be available for a longer period of the lifecycle of the 10 series cards. These will be built to a higher quality standard using premium components to justify the relatively higher cost. Whether consumers will show a preference for these or opt for the custom manufacturer variants remains to be seen, but initial data suggests that the new Pascal GPUs are very much in demand despite the seemingly higher pricepoints, simply because of their Titan X dethroning performance.
Nvidia seemed pretty encouraged by the response to the event with the onsite footfall of some 100-120 people and a reported 40-45 people at a screening of the Livestream held by our friends at Techarx in Kolkata. The Livestream itself garnered some 2000 views on average on Facebook with reported maximum concurrent viewers at 360. The event was designed to appeal to as broad a gaming audience as possible and Nvidia might replicate this format at its future events in other cities. Until next time, iLL out.
Disclaimer: Nvidia India had sponsored the travelling costs of this reporter to and from the event.
