NVIDIA e Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) 2004

[Staff]

<br><blockquote><i>POITIERS, FRANCE – JULY 5TH, 2004 – NVIDIA (Nasdaq:NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, announced today more details of its worldwide sponsorship of the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) 2004, organised by LigArena and taking place for the second year running at Poitiers Futuroscope. Players from 41 countries and representing all five continents have qualified through regional and national contests, and will compete in the grand finals this week from July 6th to 11th.<p>

The qualifying tournaments have been taking place throughout this year, with 250,000 players from all over the world vying to qualify as the best worldwide teams in three game disciplines, Counter Strike, FIFA Soccer 2004 and Warcraft III. The winning teams in each category have been invited to Poitiers to play in the finals at the mighty Futuroscope complex for a share of the impressive €200,000 prize fund.<p>

NVIDIA has taken a leading role in the organisation and the promotion of the ESWC, delivering 400 graphics boards for all PCs used by the players during the finals. Furthermore, NVIDIA’s Steve Sims, worldwide product manager for the GeForce 6 series, will use the ESWC’s prestigious stage to unveil and showcase for the first time, worldwide, the new GeForce 6800 PCI Express SLI boards (two GeForce 6 graphics boards linked together for truly unbeatable graphics performance). The presentation will take place at midday on Friday July 9th.<p>

In addition, NVIDIA will be providing a showcase for spectators in between the matches and will be giving them a chance to try out the games and the hardware for themselves. Supported by its partners, Chaintech, Gigabyte, Leadtek and PNY, NVIDIA will host two demonstration ‘villages’, where a selection of the very latest games, including Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller, Toca Race 2, Ground Control 2 and Soldner: Secret War will be running on the revolutionary GeForce 6800 graphics processors. <p>

The NVIDIA GeForce 6 series of graphics processors enables gamers to experience blazing fast 3D performance at ultra high resolutions, unmatched visual quality, with a new generation of cinematic gaming effects and a video processing engine for high-definition video and DVD playback.<p>
For more information on the Electronic Sports World Cup, its programme of events and results, please visit http://www.esworldcup.com </i></blockquote><p>