Published in Graphics

How Nvidia helps keep PC gaming alive

by on27 September 2010
nvidia

TWIMTBP fights the console world

Console gaming has become popular, really popular over the last few years. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft did a great job releasing great consoles at very reasonable price points. The fact that $200 buys you an entry level Xbox 360 or Sony Playstation 3 isn’t really helping PC gaming at all. Sony and Microsoft did a better job on the graphics side, and games look awesome on them.

A decent graphics card will cost from $199 all the way to $599 and let’s not forget that you need the rest of the PC to pay games. If you want to go into high resolutions, you need a good CPU, lots of memory, fast hard drive and of course big monitor. All this costs way more than a gaming console. A console is also hooked on a TV, making it even more affordable affordable. None of this is helping PC gaming as the cost benefit is on console side. But consoles have a big disadvantage, as they are stuck with pre DirectX 9 chips, ironically from Nvidia and ATI.

Innovation is on the PC and graphics card side as you can update your graphics card and get DirectX 11 hardware for a relatively small amount of money.  Here is the part when we try to explain what this have to do with Nvidia’s content creation group. In order to make a game look different and better on a PC, they put in a lot of effort. They will fly thousands of miles and help the developers with the next generation technologies including physics, tessellation, and all sorts of advanced shaders, all with one thing in mind.

PC games must look better than the console games. The reason is simple, if games don’t look better on a PC and if they are identical to console versions, console manufacturers will simply win and PC gaming market will start shrinking. Of course there is some financial interest behind it. Nvidia spends millions of dollars on Tony Tamasi's group where they have hundreds of people who work very hard to make these games better. Better games on PC means more demand for graphics cards, and guess what, this is what gets a lot of profit for Nvidia.

We are sure that some of the code that these guys are writing does run faster on Nvidia than on ATI, but hey, they are doing the hard work and spending the money on this huge group of developers. So all you PC gamers should give yours hats up for these guys, as these are the people who make the difference. It’s not only that, they really like to party, at least some of them. ATI / AMD unfortunately doesn’t really have anything that it can match Nvidia’s content creation group. ATI has a group of a few dedicated individuals who work hard to help this cause and make games better on AMD Radeon hardware, but on a much smaller level. We would like to see this change, but we cannot see it happening anytime soon.

As long as you don’t want to see the PC gaming market shrinking and becoming irrelevant compared to consoles, we can only hope you will learn to appreciate these guys. Our hats are up for The Way its Meant to be Played and special thanks to Rev, Keitha, Ashu, Daniel and many others who spend the time to paint the picture of what these guys do for the PC gaming industry.
Last modified on 27 September 2010
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