NVIDIA On Their Role in PC Games Development

GamingHobo writes "Bit-Tech has posted an interview with NVIDIA's Roy Taylor, Senior Vice President of Content/Developer Relations, which discusses his team's role in the development of next-gen PC games. He also talks about DirectX 10 performance, Vista drivers and some of the upcoming games he is anticipating the most. From the article: 'Developers wishing to use DX10 have a number of choices to make ... But the biggest is whether to layer over a DX9 title some additional DX10 effects or to decide to design for DX10 from the ground up. Both take work but one is faster to get to market than the other. It's less a question of whether DX10 is working optimally on GeForce 8-series GPUs and more a case of how is DX10 being used. To use it well — and efficiently — requires development time.'"

Re:Heh.

[michaelhood]

You obviously didn't get the idea.. My problem is that the DX10 angle was played up so severely, and that the card's potential would only truly be unlocked in a DX10 environment.

Now NVIDIA is basically advising developers to proceed with caution in DX10 implementations.

Nice.

Speaking of Nvidia Development

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of Nvidia PC game development. Why the hell are all their new versions of their useful utilities like FX Composer 2 (betas I tried to test) now requiring Windows XP (with SP2) and no more Windows 2000 support? Win2k and WinXP have virtually zero differences in hardware support and driver system architecture. I should know since I've programmed a few drivers using Microsoft's driver development kit and according to the docs nothing has changed from Win2k to WinXP for drivers and majority of the APIs, just additional features.

The thing that pisses me off is that Nvidia seems to have done this for absolutely no reason at all and Windows 2000 is still a fine operating system for me. I have no reason at all to switch to Windows XP (and hell no to Vista), I especially don't care fot the activiation headaches (I like to switch around hardware from time to time to play around with new stuff and go back once I've gotten bored with it if I don't need it, such as borring a friends Dual-P4 motherboard).

Anyway, my point/question why must Nvidia feel the need to force their customers who use their hardware for developing games into later Windows operating systems like that? Anybody got any tips on how to 'lie' or disable the windows version check to force say FX Composer 2 to install on Windows 2000? It isn't like we're talking about Windows 98 here, Win2k is a fine OS and in my opinion actually the best one Microsoft has ever done.

Re:Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge difference between 16bit and 32bit graphics. 16bit graphics using textures meant for 32bit rendering makes the results appear like a badly encoded DivX/Xvid video. I'm glad 3DFX died because if they were still around we wouldn't have made such great progress like we have been doing. Could you imagine still using their half-ass'd OpenGL like graphics API GLIDE today? I sure as hell couldn't.

Re:Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already games that can't be run at a good (60+) framerate with maximum settings at 1920x1200 by a single GeForce 8800GTX. The person who referred to that card (incorrectly, in my opinion) as a $700 paperweight was likely referring to the problems with its Vista drivers.

Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

My question would be how NVidia's helping the game developers write for and port to Linux. If popular cames were more compatible there, it'd be a lot easier to get converts; and I'd expect the game developers would be happy to see more of my software dollars go to their products rather to OS upgrades.

Re:Resolution

[llZENll]

On current displays yes its overkill, but on displays in 10 years or less it will be the standard, it takes a lot of pixels to cover your entire field of view. Some may argue we dont need this much resolution, but until we are approaching real life resolution and color depth, we will need more.

Display of the future approaching the human eyes capabilities.

60"-80" diameter hemisphere, it will probably be oval shaped, since our field of vision is.
2 GIGApixels (equal to about a 45000 x 45000 pixel image, 1000x the resolution of 1080 HD).
48 bit color (16 bits per channel).
12GB framebuffer size
@60fps = 720GB/s bandwidth

its only a matter of time...

based on information at
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolut ion.html [clarkvision.com]

Re:Heh.

[illumin8]

As an early 8800GTX adopter, I'd like to tell NVIDIA where they can shove this $700 paperweight..

I too have an 8800GTX and it's been nothing but a great card for me. All of my games play very fast in it, and it's much quieter than my previous 7800GTX. I'm not using Vista yet (sticking with XP SP2) so maybe that's why you don't like it. I have to say it is the best graphics card I've ever had.