Mangaluru: With an initiative to capture the young competitive computer gaming talent in the city, leading visual computing company ‘NVIDIA’ conducted a gaming expo, ‘GamerConnect’ on Saturday, September 24. Though GamerConnect events happen on a regular basis in tier I cities, this is a first for Mangaluru, a tier II city.
Vamshi Krishna, the Head of Marketing for NVIDIA South Asia said, “A steep rise in the number of gamers in the city is evident, computer gaming not only develops hand-eye coordination, but also increases cognitive function ability and decision making. As many as 70 per cent of the gamers all over the country are in the age group of 18 to 24 and male dominated. We aim at making it a balance between the genders through more female participation.”
Speaking about why he chose Mangaluru as one of the GamerConnect venues, Vamshi said, “We have been conducting GamerConnect events in many big cities in small forms, but this is the first time that we are conducting such a big event in Mangaluru. Apart from getting the gamers of the city to get together, discuss and explore new avenues in gaming, we also encourage gaming café owners with programmes which will help them develop and acknowledge the trends in gaming.”
A lot of new trends in the gaming world were revealed in the expo with different computers equipped with state-of-the-art gaming configuration. Games of various types, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like Defense of the Ancients, first person shooter games like Call of Duty and Counter Strike Global Offensive, third person role playing games like Tomb Raider and Witcher 3 were played on these computers effortlessly and made gaming look more or less like reality.
Most of the computers there could play high resolution games at 100 frames per second with ease with NVIDIA’s new graphics card series with ‘Pascal Architecture’. A liquid cooled super gaming computer, ‘ZOTAK ArcticStorm Waterblock’ jointly designed by Intel and ZOTAK (another visual computing company) which is a monstrous looking CPU with coolant filled see-through pipes running from the graphics card through the processor to a cooling unit with four dedicated fans to cool the beast down. “This is the star of the show which runs with a 10 core processor overclocked to perform gaming prowess”, said Harsheel Thank from ZOTAK who worked with the guys from Intel on this machine.
Another star of the show is the virtual reality configuration which will make the player experience life like feel while in the game though he/she will look like a cyborg to others. The game on display to experience virtual reality is where zombies appear from a distance and walk eerily towards the player in the dark, but all that the player has is a gun with limited ammo and a torchlight to fend for himself in close quarters.
Around 200 gamers from the city came to see and feel the new trends in their world of virtual life. After Mangaluru, NVIDIA team is planning on moving to their next city in the list, Jaipur on October 8.
