Nvidia Geforce GTX Battlebox to improve 4K gaming

Nvidia has announced the Geforce GTX Battlebox program, designed to give gamers the very best performance for any game at resolutions up to Ultra HD 4K.

It is unknown at this point if the Battlebox program will reach South African retailers, as most UltraHD 4K monitors are not available at reasonable price points.

Battlebox is a range of systems that adhere to Nvidia’s list of recommendations for high-end gaming. Built primarily around the Kepler-based GTX780, the systems are designed to run games that use Geforce-only abilities like Physx, 3D Vision, Nvidia Surround support and TXAA.

Nvidia Battlebox setup

“If you’re like us, the quality of your experience in upcoming AAA games is paramount. To assure that ultimate experience, NVIDIA has readied the GeForce GTX Battlebox program. Working in concert with hand-picked system builders, we’ve developed a new breed of gaming machine purposely built to play this Holiday’s AAA, combat-focused games at super high resolutions, at high settings and every NVIDIA-exclusive feature enabled,” said the company.

Battleboxes will also require an overclocked Intel Haswell Core i5 or Core i7 K-series processor, 8GB or more system memory, a solid state drive as standard and two or more Geforce GTX780 graphics cards. The systems will be offered in the US by companies like Maingear, Origin, and Scan computers.

Nvidia Battlebox performance compared to Titan.

An interesting part of the Battlebox program is that the complete system has to be sold with a UltraHD 4K monitor. Nvidia says that systems without such a monitor won’t be able to advertise itself as a Battlebox and will not qualify for assisted advertising from Nvidia.

4K monitors are still prohibitively expensive outside the United States and adoption rates are low, with no entries for the standard in the latest Steam Hardware and Software survey.

Nvidia’s main rival, AMD, does not heavily advertise gaming on 4K monitors due to the nature of how they currently work. Monitors like the ASUS PQ321 are addressed similarly to a two-monitor Eyefinity or Surround setup, which does not work properly when a pair of Radeon cards in Crossfire are linked to it. Due to AMD’s continuing woes with frame pacing on multiple monitors and in older games, this makes any SLI setup more attractive.