The NVIDIA Celebration

Day Three: Friday, May 14, 2004

Well, it was the last day of E3 2004 and far from winding down, the energy on the show floor continued at a frenetic pace, as attendees tried to pack in as much as they could before the close at 4 p.m. The NVIDIA booth was packed with gamers vying for a chance to play the hottest titles on the hottest hardware: the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GPU.

Of more than 45 games in the NVIDIA booth, Ubisoft's Far Cry garnered some serious attention. The demo pod was consistently busy with users wanting to play the game running on the GeForce 6800. With plans to implement Shader Model 3.0 effects in a future patch, you can be sure that Far Cry will continue to push the threshold of next-generation action gaming.

Another popular title in the NVIDIA booth was EverQuest II from Sony Online Entertainment. Designed with future hardware implementations in mind, EQII will require a DirectX 9 compatible card, making the GeForce 6 Series of GPUs the perfect choice. Jon Davis, a lead programmer for Sony Online Entertainment said, "The GeForce 6800 is great. Basically, we can run the game at whatever resolution we want with it."

There is also a lot of buzz around the upcoming title Armies of Exigo from EA Games—and for good reason. This real-time strategy (RTS) game includes both above-ground and below-ground combat, with a fully functioning underground map. And this game employs a massive number of units: requiring a lot of performance and a lot of power, delivered by the GeForce 6800 + NVIDIA nForce3 hardware combo.

Guild Wars "E3 is for Everyone" Experience

For a new twist on the tradeshow experience, NCsoft let players from around the world get into ArenaNet's Guild Wars MMORPG as it happened on the show floor. For all three days of the show, Internet gamers were invited to experience the game first-hand, months before its release and even before beta testing. Hopefully we'll see even more of this type of experience in future shows.

A visit to the America's Army ooth revealed some of the new developments for both the Downrange update and Overmatch. A number of new implementations include detailed, mobile Stryker vehicles and the remote-controlled Talon EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) robot. In addition, the development team plans to implement ragdoll physics for more realistic models. Keep an eye out for the updates to this popular, free online action game.

From the opening on Wednesday morning to the close on Friday afternoon, E3 was a clear success. For E3's 10th anniversary the electronic entertainment industry came out in full force with the latest and greatest software showing on the highest-performance hardware. Visitors to NVIDIA's booth, and all over the show floor, were able to test drive the GeForce 6800—the only GPU today with Shader Model 3.0 support—as well as some of the exciting innovative technologies that NVIDIA is driving.