Guest: Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA, GeForce Graphics
Host: Rio Pesino - PodTech.net

Rio Pesino - PodTech
This is Rio Pesino for PodTech.net. I am here with Ujesh Desai, who is the General Manager for NVIDIA's GeForce Desktop Graphics. Welcome to the PodTech, Ujesh.

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
Thanks.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Big announcement today, you got to tell us what happened.

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
We announced two products today. I was happy to announce one of them. One of them was the GeForce 8800 GPUs. There are two products GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS. We also announced some of our new motherboard products the nForce 680 series. So, two really exciting announcements that we made here.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
And the GeForce 8800 was something that's been widely talked about on the Internet. Go on and just give us brief synopsis of what makes the GeForce 8800 different than the 7900?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
Absolutely, there's three things basically that we're focused on. One is it's a brand new unified architecture, I'll talk about that in a second, but basically it just gives you amazing PC performance. The second is DX10, the DirectX 10, it's the world's first DirectX 10 GPU, and that's a brand new programming interface from Microsoft that's just going to completely change the face of gaming. And then the third area is just incredible amounts of image quality and performance.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Now, I understand, there's also a more affordable GeForce model available as well, right?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
There's two, the high end is the GeForce 8800 GTX, that will go anywhere between 599 and 649 US, and then the GeForce 8800 GTS will go between 449, or 499 US.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Now, what's the difference between the two?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
The difference between the two is specification. So, I talked about this unified architecture, but the way the unified architecture works is you have a bunch of streaming processors that make up the core. The 8800 GTX has a 128 of the streaming processors running at1.35GHz, okay. So, the 8800 GTS has 96 of these streaming processors and they run at 1.2GHz. So, still pretty phenomenal process even for the entry level 8800.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Let's talk clock speed and memory speed, breakdown all the numbers.

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
So, the clock speed on the high-end one is 575MHz core, 900MHz memory. The clock speed on the GTS is 500MHz core and 800MHz memory.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
You mentioned DirectX 10 and Vista. How does this product work with those two and tell me about that?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
Sure. So, both of these products are 100% Vista compliant, they are also the first GPUs or Graphics Processors in the world to support Microsoft's brand new programming API that they call DirectX 10. The way this is different from DirectX 9 is it completely redefines some of the things that you can do. You can actually now generate and create geometry on your GPU, something previously you couldn't do before. So, you're going to see game developers have all sorts of new applications that they put in their game for really large, rich environment. I don't know if you we're at the product announcement today, there we showed off some of those games. We showed Crysis from the makers of Far Cry, I mean the graphics realism in that game was just stunning. World in Conflict is a RTS, another game that if you saw the nuke explosion that we had at the end, all the smoke, the fire, the explosions, all of that is being generated and done on the GPU now.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Another thing you mentioned during the product announcement was HD and its role with Vista and Next-Gen, the new gaming system out there. Why don't you touch a little bit on that, on HD?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
Sure. We're about go through a once in a decay transition. We were going from DVD, which is the traditional way of watching movies on your PC to High-Def. There's a couple key facts I talked about in the presentation. It's four times the bit rate, right you're going from 10 megabits per second to 40 megabits per second. You're drawing or rendering six times the number of pixels right on your screen going from 480P to 1080P, and then its 10x the codec complexity, right, the codec for DVD was MPEG-2 and the codec for High-Def is H.264. So, you're going to need a tremendous of processing power to be able to do that and we have that. So, in our GeForce 8800 we have a dedicated video engine, we call it PureVideo HD.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Now, if you can just briefly -- I know this would be kind of tough, but if you could briefly summarize, how the GeForce 8800 changes the face of gaming?

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
I think fundamentally you're going to see special effects like you've never seen before on any previous generation GPU card you had, and not just that when you see those effects, you're not going to have to sacrifice image quality or performance. You saw the perf numbers we showed, right? 2X is the performance of our previous generation, so just phenomenal graphic performance and realism.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
There was another product not just the GeForce 8800, but something else you guys announced as well, go ahead and tell us about that.

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
The nForce 600 series. So, we had two products that we announced. One was the 680i, which is our core-logic chipset for Intel and then we had 680a, which is a core-logic chipset for AMD. Both of these products are just phenomenal and they round out what is the core of the definitive gaming platform. You need graphics, but you need -- we call it the heart and soul, right. You need your heart, the backbone of your PC and that's your motherboard. So, the 600 series that we're announcing is just phenomenal. Networking capabilities and -- Drew Henry, who's our General Manager for nForce talked about it. You'll be able to transfer like a 30 minute movie, a 30 minute TV show around your house from one PC to the next in under one second, that's pretty phenomenal. The storage capacity, the storage that we have here you can support up to 8 terabytes of storage. So, just phenomenal storage, phenomenal networking and that's all the heart and soul of your motherboard.

Rio Pesino - PodTech
Sounds exciting, it's exciting for me as gamer myself. Ujesh, appreciate the talk, congratulations, and (Inaudible) look for everything great.

Ujesh Desai - NVIDIA
Thank you.