A day of interaction with fellow tech and gaming bloggers, Nvidia and Palit hosted a bloggers lunch to announce their new line of products.

Last December 11 at the Circles Event Cafe in Makati Shangri-La, Nvidia along with their partner Palit hosted a lunch gathering for gaming and tech media. A day of social gathering with the media and a great opportunity for Nvidia to announce their newest line of GTX 900 series video cards; the Geforce GTX 970 and 980.

GTX 970 

Engine Specs:

• CUDA Cores: 1664
• Base Clock (MHz): 1050
• Boost Clock (MHz): 1178
• Texture Fill Rate (GigaTexels/sec): 109

Memory Specs:

• Memory Clock: 7.0 Gbps
• Standard Memory Config: 4 GB
• Memory Interface: GDDR5
• Memory Interface Width: 256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 224

GTX 980

Engine Specs:

• CUDA Cores: 2048
• Base Clock (MHz): 1126
• Boost Clock (MHz): 1216
• Texture Fill Rate (GigaTexels/sec): 144

Memory Specs:

• Memory Clock: 7.0 Gbps
• Standard Memory Config: 4 GB
• Memory Interface: GDDR5
• Memory Interface Width: 256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 224

Both the GTX 970 and 980 will have a special Ubisoft game bundle, those who purchased any of the two graphic cards can download either The Crew, Farcry 4 or Assassin’s Creed: Unity for free.

NVIDIA representative Marvin Uy explained that majority of the PC users are using Nvidia graphic cards, and with its open and dynamic features of their line of products, consumers will fully enjoy pure gaming entertainment and better processing power.

Their newest line of GPUs are now powered with the new Maxwell microachitecture that ensures optimal graphical performance. Some of the new features that is available for the new cards are the Multi-Frame sampled Anti-Aliasing (MFAA) that provides better performance on the graphical processing power and at the same time, maintaining smooth edges on the graphics, the Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) that allows 4K-like visual quality when using 1080 resolution displays, Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI) that can enhance dynamic lighting and geometry effects to provide the most realistic visuals and finally the VR Direct lets you play selected games using the Oculus Rift VR headset with lesser latency.

Aside from the special features that are available only to the new graphic cards, there are some other nifty features that can only be found in Nvidia cards, these include Shadowplay; where you can record and stream gameplay footage without affecting the framerate of your game, G-Sync which improves the display refresh rate between your monitor and your GPU that eliminates screen tearing and input lags, and the G-Sync can handle  up to four multiple monitors without sacrificing performance thanks to the Nvidia Surround feature. The GeForce Experience where it can automatically optimized any supported PC games on your Nvidia card to ensure the best visual quality and performance and the Nvidia GameStream that lets you use any Nvidia Shield handheld devices to play PC games away from your computer with less latency.

Before the presentation ended, Marvin made a small demonstration with the media on how to ‘Optimize your PC’, which can make a big difference when buying computers for everyday use like playing games, browsing the internet or other multimedia functions. As most PC retail shops offered PC packages that promised a great deal on your money, some did not realized that majority of the said ‘packaged computers’ aren’t optimized properly, cases like having the fastest processor but only bundled with generic integrated video cards and lower memory sizes will result in poor performance. As a result, 2 out of 3 customers are not satisfied with their purchases.

Left: I5 4670K running at 3.4GHz
Right: Pentium G620 running at 2.6GHz with Palit GTX 750

In this demonstration, Marvin presented two PC rigs; both running the Battlefield 4 game with maximum settings; one equipped with a high-end Intel i5k series processor but only includes an integrated graphic card, which the unit costs almost twelve thousand Pesos (PhP 12,000), the game is running at around 12-10 frames per second, which made it almost impossible to play. While the other unit is running in a lower-end Intel Pentium processor but with a GTX 750 OC card; which is priced at around eight thousand Pesos (PhP 8,000), it can handle Battlefield 4 at around 35-45 frames per second, which is the average playable and acceptable framerate for games. And to convince those who are not into gaming, Marvin performed a benchmark for an image editing software on both units, the more expensive unit took a couple of minutes to finish its benchmark and showing poor score results, on the other hand, the less expensive unit managed to complete the benchmark in a much shorter time along with a high score result, and to add that, Battlefield 4 was even running at the same unit while performing a benchmark.

This proved that having the fastest processor will ensure that you will have the best performance for your computer, but rather having both a good processor and graphic card and proper knowledge on computers can give you the most optimized computer performance and also saving you a lot of money when purchasing. We are looking forward to NVIDIA in providing the consumers the best products and features.

Both the GTX 970 and 980 from Palit are now available in the market

You can check more pictures of the event below:

Special shout out to the Techporn dood, Leo Durana a Happy Birthday!