“Since the economy is affecting everyone’s ability to travel, this year
we plan to focus our attention on the core of the GPU development
community with a more concentrated event,” NVIDIA’s Derek Perez told
Ars when we asked him about this morning’s DigiTimes report that NVISION ’09 has been canceled. “Details will be announced soon on this developer event, as well as the next NVISION.”
The NVISION08 show was definitely one of the most interesting of last year and included a great LAN party, developer learning sessions and great demonstrations of the visual computing medium. That is even where we first learned about the X58 chipset gaining access to SLI graphics technology.
Will we see another NVISION in 2009?
On a personal note, I was told during the event last year that NVIDIA had already contracted to renting the San Jose Convention Center for the next three years for that and future NVISION shows. Obviously, if NVIDIA is backing out of that commitment, there will be some financial hit to company from the convention hall organizers but obviously not as much as going through with the entire event. Times are indeed tough in the world of GPUs it seems…
Yes, the economy is indeed affecting travel: I’ve recently heard secondhand stories of slashed travel budgets at a number of tech companies, and the sparse media attendance at some recent events that I’ve been to indicates that reporters aren’t getting out much either. But things must be grim indeed for NVIDIA to do this to NVISION. (Whether this is a “delay” or a “cancelation” depends on when the next NVISION happens—if it’s pushed back to 2010, then it was a “cancellation.”)
