An Interview with NVIDIA's V.P. Content Relations

Graphics or gameplay… which one would you choose and why?

Neither. One without the other just doesn’t work. For example the Wii offers some great game play but it’s just so ugly my eyes hurt! The same is true of some MMOGs too. I would argue (fiercely!) that one shouldn’t be at the expense of the other. For example we can, with DX10, make truly great volumetric clouds / fog / smoke. But just making any of those look good for their own sake isn’t much fun. On the other hand what if the volumetric fog was used to hide an enemy bomber, I mean looking up at the sky. You can hear it but you cant see it and then wham it comes down out of the clouds, as it emerges the sun glints into your eyes at the same time? Now you have panic, you know it’s an enemy plane swooping down but the sunlight doesn’t let you fire at it. That’s using good graphics for great game play. That’s fun!

Crysis looks absolutely mind blowing but how scalable will the game actually be? Will it run on older cards? Will the game ever come to next gen consoles?

I am good friends with the guys at Crytek and feel safe to say that the game will scale better than most people think. The team at Crytek and our engineers who have been with them for 10 months have worked hard on this aspect too. The min specs haven't been announced but it’s fair. As for consoles you will have to address that to them please!

Do you think PC gaming is dying since consoles are far more feasible to the casual gamer? Where do you see PC gaming 5 years down the line?

No! Absolutely not! What has happened is that gamers have moved away from buying in stores, nor do they watch TV or listen to the radio. We refer to them as the 'lost boys'. But they are buying and playing PC games. There are three areas of astounding growth taking place. 1. MMOG’s (WOW has 9M subscribers), 2.. Casual games like those at www.pogo.com 3. Digitial downloads like Direct2Drive and STEAM. But if you look at all three none of them appear in the normal channels of data research. PC gaming is alive, thriving and fragging like there’s no tomorrow!

Five years from now we will see more genre blending. Already Huxley is being described as a MMO-FPS and we will see more of this as the capability of the PC accelerates. The future is very exciting indeed.

In layman terms, kindly explain to our viewers what the age of DirectX 10 will bring to the table and how is it going to affect gaming as we know it? Besides eye candy what kind of gameplay perks can we expect with DirectX 10 games?

There will be huge game-play advantages. Developers are just beginning to understand how big the changes really are. Here is another example. Until now faces on characters have been a big challenge. Have you noticed how many games have troops / people / bad guys wearing masks? Or when you run up to someone they look just like all the others? Well that’s because face art and animation is very hardware/software intensive. With DX10 that changes. It’s now possible using state based instancing (amongst other techniques) to have lots of people all with different looks and with facial animation. So for example your character could run into a crowd at a bar or a disco or anywhere else and startle / frighten the people there and have them react in different ways.

Imagine watching the wind blow across a field as you lie waiting to ambush your enemy. It adds to the buildup immensely making the overall gaming experience much more enjoyable and immersive.

This is all new and will be a whole new way of bringing interactivity in game play.