The Choice Of PC Gamers Worldwide.
“Look for this seal on games optimized for NVIDIA GPUs for an easy install and play experience.”
At what point in time will gamers be divided on the software they buy because of the hardware which is in their PC? Considering the numbers of PC games sold has been coming down every year since 1999 game developers can’t afford to divide the PC gaming community even more by favouring particular hardware over their competition. But this is what we are seeing happening more and more in gaming and this is all about money.
NVIDIA and ATI pay game developers to have their logos displayed at the start of a game. This is a common occurrence with hardly any games released now from major developers not carrying some form of endorsement while their game boots. However, this has led several game titles to suffer on hardware from the opposing manufacturer. There are several distinct cases of this. The first involves Far Cry and the second Half Life 2. Obviously, game developers have to cover their overheads and make a return on their investment. With development times hitting up to four years these businesses (because, lets face it, that’s what they are) need to stay afloat. This extended development time means no income for them and a business, like everyone else, has bills to pay, wages to pay, expenses and the like. Gaining endorsements from the hardware developers also allows the game developers to utilize resources from personnel and hardware technicians from within NVIDIA and ATI. However, at what expense to the game play experience should this detriment any gamer on such a universal piece of hardware which is the PC?
Far Cry was one of the notable game releases which had to be heavily patched due to problems running on ATI cards. From hearsay in the industry ATI had to kick in a large sum of money for Crytek to patch the software to fix the compatibility issues the software had running on ATI cards. ATI users had to suffer until the 1.2 patch came out to fix many issues related to graphical ‘glitches’ in game. The other example is with Half Life 2 which was customized to run on ATI cards. From what I understand from reading hardware reviews from places such as driverheaven and Tom’s Hardware Guide is that you are better off running Half Life 2 on a single NVIDIA card rather than in SLI mode.
This is a trend which should concern gamers if it continues. I don’t want to have to own two different brands of graphics cards in order to run games at their best. Ultimately, if this becomes a more common practice within the PC gaming market then the only thing that software developers are going to do is to drive gamers to consoles. That way they don’t have to worry about the hardware. They can just put the DVD in the console and play.
And who really believes the line, “Plays better on ALIENWARE” anyway?
“Look for this seal on games optimized for NVIDIA GPUs for an easy install and play experience.”
At what point in time will gamers be divided on the software they buy because of the hardware which is in their PC? Considering the numbers of PC games sold has been coming down every year since 1999 game developers can’t afford to divide the PC gaming community even more by favouring particular hardware over their competition. But this is what we are seeing happening more and more in gaming and this is all about money.
NVIDIA and ATI pay game developers to have their logos displayed at the start of a game. This is a common occurrence with hardly any games released now from major developers not carrying some form of endorsement while their game boots. However, this has led several game titles to suffer on hardware from the opposing manufacturer. There are several distinct cases of this. The first involves Far Cry and the second Half Life 2. Obviously, game developers have to cover their overheads and make a return on their investment. With development times hitting up to four years these businesses (because, lets face it, that’s what they are) need to stay afloat. This extended development time means no income for them and a business, like everyone else, has bills to pay, wages to pay, expenses and the like. Gaining endorsements from the hardware developers also allows the game developers to utilize resources from personnel and hardware technicians from within NVIDIA and ATI. However, at what expense to the game play experience should this detriment any gamer on such a universal piece of hardware which is the PC?
Far Cry was one of the notable game releases which had to be heavily patched due to problems running on ATI cards. From hearsay in the industry ATI had to kick in a large sum of money for Crytek to patch the software to fix the compatibility issues the software had running on ATI cards. ATI users had to suffer until the 1.2 patch came out to fix many issues related to graphical ‘glitches’ in game. The other example is with Half Life 2 which was customized to run on ATI cards. From what I understand from reading hardware reviews from places such as driverheaven and Tom’s Hardware Guide is that you are better off running Half Life 2 on a single NVIDIA card rather than in SLI mode.
This is a trend which should concern gamers if it continues. I don’t want to have to own two different brands of graphics cards in order to run games at their best. Ultimately, if this becomes a more common practice within the PC gaming market then the only thing that software developers are going to do is to drive gamers to consoles. That way they don’t have to worry about the hardware. They can just put the DVD in the console and play.
And who really believes the line, “Plays better on ALIENWARE” anyway?
posted by thecynicalgamer @ 5:52 pm
1 Comments:
At 3:41 pm,
Anonymous said…
Yeah i don't know really. But sometimes i think it subliminally affects me. I think that my lowish fps is a result of my Nvidia card as opposed to ATI. When in reality it is because im using a low end AMD processor, and its the true bottleneck.
Its all damn marketing, and i hate it when it works on me.
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