NVIDIA's Party on Saturday Night
NVIDIA's CEBIT Party
This is my first time at CEBIT and before I flew out, the two things everyone told me were "you need good walking shoes" and "NVIDIA's party is not to be missed". With the first piece of advice paying me dividends on my second day at the show, I wandered along to follow the second piece. I was joined by the rest of Team HEXUS, NVIDIA staff, journalists from other publications and also some guys from ATI, showing up because NVIDIA employees had turned up, hilariously, to ATI's birthday party on Friday.
Held in a giant beer hall, nestling in between a couple of the other halls on the sprawling CeBit Messe campus, the party is a chance to drink beer and enjoy food in a traditional German setting with NVIDIA guys, gals and their invited guests. Rather than waffle on, I'll tell the story, pictorial style. Enjoy.
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The party started with the Halle filled with hungry and thirsty patrons. Not all of the Halle is filled by NVIDIA's guests; we just had a small section on the upper deck, which is where I took the photo from. I don't even begin to show the scale of the place with that shot, either. All through the night the band play horrible 1980s songs and the crowd sing along, badly. However bad, though, you always end up joining in.
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While waiting for food to arrive, we tucked into some beer - it is Germany after all - in NVIDIA's special one litre steins. You can see NVIDIA's Stephan Quentin, who's responsible for Southern European Product PR, benchmarking the stein's ability to correctly hold a carbonated alcoholic beverage and dispense it in a fashion that's conducive to getting plastered, along with the X86 Secret guys, Raphael and Samuel, who wisely manouvered out of shot just in time.
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Hardinfo's John Fabricius watches the always-hammered 'Wavey' Dave Baumann, EIC of Beyond3D. Now you know where the Wavey comes from. I met John for the first time at the party, along with his Dad, and they're both mad vikings. If you ever do CeBit, make sure and have a beer or twelve with the Fabricius father-son combo.
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The mighty Lars Weinand, Tom's Hardware's 3D maestro, buffs himself up on camera right before using those muscles to man-handle NVIDIA's Andrew Humber (who's HEXUS' Nick's twin brother) who you can see on the left. And that's when the trouble started.
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ATI's Chris Hook, the one with his back to the camera and the one responsible for a chunk of their PR in Europe, squares up to an obviously disturbed Adam Foat, somewhat his opposite number at NVIDIA, for fisticuffs. Words are exchanged, people look shocked and at one point it looked like turning nasty.
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The Inquirer's Fuad Abazovich offers Adam some support, in the form of a kiss, the start of which I managed to capture on camera as you can see. Lip reading after their intimate moment, Fudo could be seen telling Adam to "go right for his memory controller before punching him square in the ROPs". Nasty stuff.
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Only joking! Everything was peaceful, the ATI and NVIDIA guys and gals enjoying a great night together, having a laugh and enjoying each other's company in a rare moment outside of the usual pushing and shoving that defines the presented world of 3D graphics. Everyone knows everyone else and friendships exist between the two. NVIDIA's Andrew Humber, fresh from his liason with Lars, and Adam Foat, flank Chris as they enjoy yet more beer. Our Nick lurks in the background, keeping the peace.
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All that was left was to help NVIDIA develop their next generation of SLI technology. An idea hatched by X86 Secret's Samuel, ably assisted by Raphael, Stephan, the Wavey One and myself, we've got the basics of the system up and running on the table. Multi-participant Drunken Rendering is the next big thing. Enough performance from the system enables anti-aliasing to be free, as your eyes blur one image into the next effortlessly.
SLI? So Little Imbued! MVP? More Vodka Please! And it scales so well. As I integrated the system and playtested over the next hour or two, a little leak testing happened and the performance from free AA, something 3dfx last spoke about in earnest, manifested itself.
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After testing prototypes 4 through 12, Baumann gets caught with his finger where it shouldn't be. HEXUS' Andy Davies offers advice on how to get out of it. "Tug a little harder, Dave!". "Oh Christ, my forum members are going to love this".
A fine party and one I won't miss next year. It was good to see red and green coexist happily as we all put prototypes of Samuel's invention through their paces.
MPDR. You heard it here first. Finally, if you're interested in a few more pictures taken with MPDR AA active, you can see the Senior Fabricius arguing the toss and AMD's Raba discussing a tie-in with one of the Galaxy girls. Said girl was a little less clothed on their stand today. Poor lass. There's also her Galaxy cohort who's endearing features kept many of the more MPDR AA-affected men smiling that night. Last of all, three fifths of Team HEXUS enjoy the festivities.
