Nvidia's TWIMTBP continues it's dominance

[W1nTry]

Hmm

DAAMIT's Steamy love affair is over

Steam drifts towards Nvidia

By Wily Ferret: Thursday, 10 January 2008, 10:47 AM

IS VALVE'S GRAPHICS DARLING relationship with DAAMIT at a close?

Ever since ATI forked out a large wadge of cash to help 'develop' Half-Life 2 (leading to a memorable launch event for the game on Alcatraz where the game wasn't playable after the famous delay) the red team has been snuggled up tight with the boys from Seattle, to the point where even the Orange box has little 'plays best on ATI' messages embedded into the menu system.

Well now it seems that the continued dominance of Nvidia in the Steam Hardware Survey has taken a toll, and Valve is offering a free copy of Portal: First Slice just for GeForce owners. The offer is available at Steampowered.com/nvidia and is logo'd up with the TWIMTBP badge.

Graphzilla has managed to bag most of the gaming industry for its development enhancement scheme. With their staff having a rather bigger pocket of cash to play with, it seems that Valve is the latest to fall into their thrall.

I don't completely agree that this is best for the industry as this abuse of marketing money to develop games to run better on specific hardware ENSURES that the competing device has an uphill challenge which creates an even MORE unlevel playing field. Should this begin to seriously impact on sale of the competition (which I guess it doesn't to a great extent yet) means we could lose competition and be subject to more customer abuse with pricing. Its the same as Intel killing DAAMIT. Without competition the CONSUMER suffers.

[shivadee]

couple tings to say

New PC incomming in 2 weeks (already ordered)
Arcman and Awesome help design this bitch

FALCON NORTHWEST
Tri Sli capability

[Spazosaurus]

Oh yeah that machine's gonna be a biatch. You better not dream about bringing that thing to Trini any time soon it just might get ninja'd.

W1n's got a good point, but I think that as long as developers ensure their products run on both platforms at least on almost the same level, everything should be ok. For example, in an Nvidia sponsored game, it could run, lets say, 3-6 fps better for the most than an ati part.