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

The PS3 is a lot more powerful console yet games like Call of Duty 3 and Splinter Cell Double Agent fared a lot better on the Xbox 360. Why do you think this is so and by when will developers truly tap the PS3’s potential?

My role at NVIDIA is to promote PC games I am afraid you will have to ask that question to Sony. But I will add that the PC will always give the best gaming experience. Always!

Do you own a console? (If so kindly elaborate). What is your poison (game wise)?

I have three sons and I like to hear their opinions so I always make sure they get the latest consoles. We have them all at home. I did try Fight Night on the Xbox360 and I played the Wii one evening (research!) but 'personally all console games leave me cold. I like my games to be played at 25x16 and I enjoy the keyboard / mouse configuration too much.

What are your views on India as a market?

We love India as a place to visit and to do business and we are excited to have the opportunity to be working there. NVIDIA has a sizeable investment already with sales, marketing, engineering and research teams already in place. In fact, 1 of out of 6 NVIDIA employees is BASED in India!

We are also working with India Games and we want to do more. Of course, being British, I also love the food, but to answer your question, it’s clear that India has the infrastructure, education and hard work culture to grow enormously in the future. That growth and the opportunities are too exciting to miss out on so we are very focused on this market.

Quite a few of the game boxes carry the logo The Way It’s Meant To Be Played. Can you tell us a bit a more about it?

We call it TWIMTBP for short. Wherever a gamer sees the TWIMTBP logo, he can be sure that the game’s developer and publisher recommend NVIDIA hardware for the best experience.

The logo means that our graphics experts and engineers have made sure that the game is compatible, stable and reliable on our hardware and that we continue to work with the developer for future updates, be it in form of our drivers or game patches.

Titles such as CoH, Oblivion etc. already look awesome on DX 9 and our imagination runs wild thinking what DX10 games would look like. Are there any plans to patch or upgrade some of these DX9 titles to DX10?

Great question. In our experience, once the developers start evaluating DX10 in depth, they get so excited that they usually end up producing a whole new game!

For example, in-game fire effects in DX 9 are still created using triangles and textures, but DX 10 allows you to create procedurally generated pixel level fire. This means that fire looks dramatically better and more real. It even acts like real fire in the sense that it can spread, flicker, explode, blow in the wind etc.

Once you understand this, you can either throwaway your old techniques or think up new ways to use the incredible capabilities of DX10 in a new game. Which one would you choose?

Also, doing DX 10 for existing games involves supporting 2 operating systems and two application programming interfaces (e.g. DX 9 and DX 10). This means, developers have to spend longer on debugging compatibility issues probably leaving less time for making fantastic game-play. DX10 and Vista are the future of PC gaming and majority of the top games will be focused on them.