Top 7 reasons why game devs choose Geforce

Nvidia’s message at E3 2013 this year wasn’t very loud and in-your-face. The green team had a small press event during the gaming expo and talked about game developers and their relationship with the company, especially when it came to designing and running games on Geforce hardware.

Nvidia claims that this year’s biggest upcoming AAA titles including Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell: Black List, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Batman: Arkham Origins are all reliant on technology inside Nvidia graphics cards to produce the visuals they offer to gamers. The company adds that the level of detail the games are capable of wouldn’t be possible on other graphics’ vendors’ hardware.

GeForce works better for games

Nvidia does seem to offer a lot of technologies that it leverages through the use of CUDA and Physx. They currently offer advanced simulators for water effects, facial movement and a host of other detail-enhancing technologies like cloth physics and TXAA, which uses less memory and offers better performance than FXAA. One of my favourite parts of their keynote at the Game Developer’s Conference this year was seeing their Waveworks technology in action, which is what powers Ubisoft’s seascape in Black Flag.

At E3, Nvidia’s’s Senior Vice President of Content and Technology, Tony Tamasi, talked about the company’s relationship with game developers and why developers would prefer Geforce. To aid his point, he brought up several game develoeprs to talk about why they chose Nvidia:

Weirder Weapons – Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software showed off an upcoming downloadable content (DLC) pack for Borderlands 2 that transforms the offbeat sci-fi world of Borderlands 2 into a dungeon crawler that pits players equipped with futuristic weapons that go bang in amazing ways against armies of creepy critters.
Wider Worlds – Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, will be set in a world ten times the size of any earlier Assassin’s Creed installments, said Carsten Myhill, lead content manager at Ubisoft. Players will explore environment alive with rolling seas, roaring waterfalls, lashing rain, and exotic landscapes. “We wanted to push the visual technology as far as imaginable,” Myhill said. “Our relationship with NVIDIA helps us do that.”
Sneakier Sneakiness – Visual effects are a central part of Splinter Cell’s action, Andy Wilson, a producer at Ubisoft Toronto, said, allowing the franchise’s stealthy hero, Sam Fisher, to flit through shadows undetected. To build Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Wilson invited NVIDIA engineers to work alongside Ubisoft’s own. The result is a demo packed with lightning that illuminates darkened rooftops, slick rain-soaked walls, and characters who fog the cold London air as they exhale.
Nicer Threads – Limin Lu, senior technical director at Snail Games explained that NVIDIA’s PhysX technology lets his developers create outfits that shake and shimmy as characters move through Snail’s virtual worlds. The result: selling new clothes to players has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in Age of Wushu a game set in ancient China.
Quicker Development – Steve Sinclair, creative director for Digital Extremes, isn’t shy about it. His small studio dug deep into NVIDIA’s technology toolbox to build a game packed with big effects. Warframe which Sinclair describes as “Ninjas in Space,” is a free to play game filled with frenetic action. And, for gamers using NVIDIA’s GPUs, it’s also full of clever visual touches that give the free-to-play game a big-budget sheen.
Explodier Explosions – Everyone likes stuff that goes boom, and there’s plenty of that in the Planetside 2 a PC game coming to the PlayStation 4 later this year that pits thousands of players against one another on sprawling battlefields. Tramell Isaac, a senior art director with Sony Online Entertainment credited NVIDIA for a host of visual flourishes – among them, spectacular explosions. “The NVIDIA guys are really great to work with,” Isaac said. ‘They actually knew our game.”
Visions of What’s Next – Epic — which builds game engines for a host of cutting-edge titles — is known for gameplay demos that set the tone for each new generation of games. And Epic didn’t disappoint when it unveiled its Infiltrator demo earlier this year. The technology behind the demo: NVIDIA GPUs, said Alan Willard, senior technical artist with Epic. “Our development workstations are NVIDIA machines,” Willard said. “NVIDIA allows us to do things we wouldn’t have thought possible.”

Tamasi also said that more game developers are flocking to the PC now than ever before because of the attractive development environment there. The company claimed that out of the slew of talented developers and studios out there, 48% of them are developing for the desktop PC, 13% are working on Xbox 360 and PS3 titles, 11% are working on the next-gen consoles while only 5% are concentrating on Wii U development.

The elephant in the room seems to be the missing 33% – presumably they’re targeting the mobile segment. The fact that Nvidia chose not to talk about the other 33% shows how worried the company is that the mobile segment will eventually eat into their chunk of market share on the desktop. Despite efforts from Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft, consumers are buying less desktop computers year on year, choosing to flock to user-friendly tablets and laptops.

However, Nvidia has plans to tackle the mobile market, which could ultimately prove to be a good things for gamers in general.