The Hindu : National : Powerful graphics chip unveiled

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 01, 2005

National

National

Powerful graphics chip unveiled

Anand Parthasarathy

Chennai PC maker launches first Indian games platform with nVIDIA processor

Graphics board (above) houses the nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX processor (left)

BANGALORE: It has 302 million transistors on board — more than those found on any contemporary personal computer chip. It crunches numbers at near supercomputer speeds: 200 giga flops or 200 billion calculations per second.

It is not some esoteric military processor or a high-end chip fuelling an engineering workstation.

This is the latest graphics processing unit or GPU — a slab of silicon delivering more 3-D realism for all those computer games that the world's young and restless seem to be playing all the time.

The U.S.-based nVIDIA Corporation, a global leader in graphics and digital media, unveiled its latest hardware solution — the GeForce 7800 GTX — in India on Thursday at one of Bangalore's popular games parlours, Game Zone2.

"The new architecture of the chip makes it so powerful that real-time games can look as real as those using offline techniques to render the 3-D images," said Alain Tiquet, nVIDIA's Group Director (Marketing) for Europe, Middle East and India, during a special briefing and demo session arranged for The Hindu on Thursday.

The graphics board consumes 10 per cent less power and is 50 per cent quieter and twice as powerful as its predecessor, the 6800.

But the single unit price is being maintained at the old rate of around Rs. 32,000 by national distributors like Rashi Peripherals, said nVIDIA's South East Asia Sales Manager, Nishant Goyal.

More special games

Indian PC makers like HCL, PCS and Zenith are expected to announce special games configurations with the 7800 under the hood very soon, but first off the block is the Chennai-based Top Notch Infotronix which has already launched a GeForce 7800-powered PC under its `Zebronics' PC brand. (www.zebronics.net) .

The machine with alternative Intel and AMD main processors can be seen in action at Zebronics' games zone at Spencer Plaza, Anna Salai in Chennai. The game zone is Asia's first gaming arcade dedicated to nVIDIA technology.

The market for games is one of the fastest growing sectors of the computer business and players like nVIDIA are positioning products to exploit all current platforms — desktop PCs, laptops, dedicated games consoles and mobile phones.Providing software by way of newer, graphically richer games for an insatiable youthful audience is emerging as a new opportunity for Indian software developers and bring software business to India.

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