Hands On With Nvidia’s Maxwell Architecture

Nvidia partnered with Red Bull to provide high-end gaming PCs for Red Bull Battle Grounds DC. These PCs used Nvidia’s new graphics cards based on their new Maxwell architecture and it was the first time these cards have been used for a major tournament. Luckily, they had a booth set up in the lobby outside of the main event hall to give spectators a hands on experience with their new Maxwell architecture graphics cards.

When I first approached their booth, I was promptly greeted by an Nvidia representative who started to give me the rundown of their demo station and what they wanted to show. The first thing that was presented to me was a simulation of a gold pendulum swinging inside a gazebo, with a light source behind the structure. There appeared to be a slight graphical issue when the pendulum would cut in front of the light source, but I gave it little thought.

It was then explained to me that the simulation was running with basic video card settings, nothing special. The frame rate would frequently change, similar to how a video game would if the settings were too high. He then turned on Nvidia’s G-SYNC for the simulation. The slight graphic glitch I had noticed was completely gone even though the FPS of the simulation continued to float between 40 and 60. The way G-SYNC was explained to me: the GPU will sync directly with the monitor to prevent any tearing when the frequency off the monitor gets out of alignment with the frames per second of whatever game is being played.

The Nvidia Rep then took me into a live game of Starcraft 2 that was being played. The game was already running flawlessly, which is to be expected considering the hardware that the game was running on.

However, he then mentioned that Starcraft 2 was running at 4k resolution (which looked phenomenal – I had never seen a game running at 4k in person before). 

Then when I had the opportunity to pan around the map, there was absolutely no screen tearing or graphical issues. This is something I run into on my own PC. I personally can run the game at 60FPS, however when panning around there can be moments of screen tearing. This is something that’s inconvenient, but is much easier to deal with then having frame rate drops and input lag from enabling Vsync (Virtual synchronization). Overall, I was very impressed with Nvidia’s new hardware features and feel that this raises the bar for graphics card manufacturers.