Its a very rainy day with key areas in the Metro suffering heavy flooding but this didn’t stop a 300 strong and more tech enthusiasts and gamers to drop by SM North Edsa for nVidia Day! One of the hottest event in recent memory because this event made it possible for 107 people if not more to go home with a brand new graphics cards from the events sponsors, all of which are board partners of nVidia which include MSI, ASUS, Palit, Sparkle, Inno3D and Manli.
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With the promise of the first 300 registrant being given an exclusive nVidia shirt, the venue was packed hours before the event started. With lines circling around the entire floor of SM North, this turnout is unprecedented in sheer magnitude for an event of this size. Mr. Glen Paul Serrano, Country Representative at nVidia Philippines, starts the event with a short opening statement then immediately starts giving away instant prizes for 10 lucky people with nVidia logos under their chairs. Co-host and Back2Gaming friend, fellow gamer and DJ Gino Quillamor follows up and immediately proceeds into instructing the attendees into touring around the venue, by batch, to see each booth present in the event. Each booth intends to demo the capabilities of nVidia technologies and how it improves key aspects of visuals we see in-game. ASUS’ booth, for example, demos FXAA and its visual quality improvement over regular MSAA and how nVidia cards easily handle the load that is typically associated with anti-aliasing. The MSI booth features the comparison between in-game graphics between integrated onboard/on-chip solutions and discrete GPU-powered systems and its pretty clear that the discrete system definitely take the cake here.
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The participating brands each gave presentations regarding their products and the accompanying technologies they put into their offerings which make them the better choice for consumers. nVidia prides itself for its Tesselation capabilities but other than that there’s FXAA, Adaptive V-sync, and of course GPU-powered PhysX rendering amongst others. Among the 6 brands that gave keynotes, MSI’s Jimmy Huang and ASUS’s Winslow Co got the biggest pop from the crowd. After each brand presentation, a bit of Q&A is held and the winners receive brand new GT600 series GPUs and goodies from the respective presenter. The attending media covering the event were also treated to some GPUs courtesy of the sponsors and yours truly, along with friends from ReimaruFiles and TechPorn, managed to take home some graphics cards with yours truly taking home a lovely MSI GT620. Thank you MSI and nVidia.
[singlepic id=7380 w=580 h=600 float=center]There were also numerous side activities during the event like a game character cosplay competition which had us witness Diablo III and DotA cosplayers strutting their stuff on stage. Making a comeback are the Best Male and Best Female cosplayers from the MSI Overdrive cosplay competition last July 7. Also held were mini-gaming showdowns for Starcraft II, Diablo III and Battlefield 3. I just have to stress that these competitions were poorly organized and lacked the dynamics of what an exciting gaming showdown could’ve been.
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nVidia Day reached its climax near the end of the event when the drawing of 30 graphics cards. That’s right THIRTY. This amount is simply unheard off in any event live event. This is like Oprah Winfrey herself decided to give away graphics cards. And if that wasn’t enough, host Gino Quillamor brought out 10 more cards to giveaway after asking everyone to don their nVidia shirts in simply an awe inspiring sea of black highlighted with white and green. A view that would move nVidia’s founder to tears and probably Razer, too. Not to be outdone, MSI’s Jimmy Huang capped off the festivities by putting up an MSI GT630 for one final prize. This was the hottest moment of the event which really got a huge pop from the audience with cheers of “MSI! MSI!” echoing across SM North. This concluded the day’s proceedings and I personally believe everyone went home a winner.
[singlepic id=7374 w=580 h=600 float=center]On a more personal note, I’d like to congratulate the people at nVidia along with their brand partners MSI, ASUS, Palit, Sparkle, Inno3D and Manli for such a wonderful event. There has been a great string of live events recently and nVidia Day has proven to be another cornerstone in the growing gaming, technology and PC enthusiast scene in the country. With crowds hailing from different niches like gamers, modders, students and tech reviewers, the turnout is just massive. Congratulations for a successful event though we didn’t quite know for sure what that thing you were going to reveal that was mentioned on the promo poster was. Irregardless, it was a nice event. Me and my fellow tech observers from TechSupot enjoyed it a lot, we managed to work up the crowd with our spontaneity and we made an unsuspecting girl take home a mouse and an ASUS graphics card.
[singlepic id=7366 w=580 h=600 float=center]nVidia Day for the most part was a very well-organized event. Everything flowed the right way, well almost since not was fine and dandy. My first observation was the venue, having been through similar events before the venue was enough but with it is well-aware that a large turnout was inevitable, the organizers should’ve opted for a bigger venue to accomodate the attendees. Another room for improvements was the interaractivity of the booths present. With the sponsor booths playing a key role in promoting these brands capabilities, a bit more hands on time would’ve worked in their favor, so in conjuction with a larger venue, larger booths from sponsors would’ve been highly rewarding. Moving on with our observations, some snacks were served mid-way through the event and my perspectivie on this is that it is NOT NECESSARY. Whilst we admire and really appreciate the thought, these kinds of things only spew out mess and chaos and should have no part in a scheduled event and besides, you’re already giving away lots of free stuff so the mindset of people is to wait for their chance, ignoring hunger and thirst. If they leave and get picked and ends up losing their chance, that is their loss for others waited for that chance and sacrificed the same.
[singlepic id=7398 w=580 h=600 float=center]The cosplay competition was a nice distraction but was totally unnecessary, it might’ve been a crowd-pleaser but it is no way able to attract nor maintain a potential crowd especially one waiting for freebies but I’ll let this one slide because it was unannounced but the fact that it took almost 30 minutes for a mere 6 cosplayers to do their stuff is too long compared to the 200+ cosplayers that other cosplay promotions have to work with on an exponentially shorter time period. The gaming showdown and supposed mini-tournaments were the most disappointing part of the event with lists of names being drawn only to end up having a 2 person per game showdown who will compete against each other. More heartache was endured when the Starcraft II tournament which was purpotedly a 1v1 match ended up as a Challenge showdown. The Diablo III tournament was in dire disarray, with what would typically be a boss rush became a speed-levelling battle. Similarly appalling was the Battlefield 3 tournament which has see 2 guys race on who gets more kills. These are particularly the low points of the event, and for a gamer-targeted brand, we expected more than ill-prepared contests. Speaking of ill-prepared, the presenters from some of the brands (Ubertech and RickTech I’m looking at you guys) wasted their opportunities to market their respective brands properly having ill-prepared material nor presentation ready or in the case of Ubertech/Palit, there was a presentation that lagged so much had its presenter having no appeal whatsoever that it was painful to watch. Good thing he immediately gave stuff away or else he’d have been lynched. In gaming slang, these guys were pwned by MSI and ASUS bigtime. These are primarily my biggest gripes about the event and is not particular to nVidia itself.
[singlepic id=7420 w=580 h=600 float=center]In closing, the event was largely successful with its massive turnout and large amount of freebies given away. We look forward to what the brands and nVidia itself have in store for us soon and hopefully we get to see more and more event like this in the near future!
