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EA and NVIDIA in Alliance

Posted by michael on from the unholy-pair dept.

Deepak Jois writes "Arstechnica is reporting that EA and NVIDIA have entered into a pact to promote each other. Among other things it also means EA will support games on all PC platforms featuring NVIDIA hardware. Also check this link to the press release."

6 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. ALL platforms? by SixArmedJesus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if they're just talking about hardware platforms, or software as well. Does this mean some good games getting released for Linux?

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    1. Re:ALL platforms? by grolim13 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      In my experience, it depends a lot on the card in question; also, some of the more recent Linux drivers are more stable than others.

      I have a Geforce 4MX and a TNT2 on my machine (i.e. dual-head), and ran the Geforce4 with the NVIDIA closed-source binary drivers and the TNT2 with the XFree drivers. Why? Because the system locks hard every few hours with the NVIDIA drivers for the TNT2. Interestingly, it has exactly the same symptoms in Win2K - if I hadn't been using Linux on the same system, I would probably be blaming Microsoft for NVIDIA's buggy drivers.

      On the other hand, getting the NVIDIA drivers to work at all is a pain. In fact, getting working drivers for any hardware that isn't supported by the stock kernel is a pain.

  2. Scissors + Standards Documents... by Jerk+City+Troll · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I guess this means we're going to see a flood of games that either require an NVIDIA accellerator or "highly recommend" one (read: "this game will look like shit on ATI").

    Nah, it'll never happen. They'll stick to OpenGL, I'm sure of it!

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  3. Re:NVidia got itself a good deal by Apreche · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wouldn't be too sure that ATI will come out as the winner. It's not like in the Voodoo days where the Voodoo 3 came out and was total crap compared to the TNT2, thus giving Nvidia the huge advantage. ATI vs. NVidia is much more involved and uncertain.

    Despite the uncertainties, I predict a role reversal. ATI was always the card that came in Dells and Gateways and such. It was the video card that was good enough to play games, but not good enough for the l33t. ATI made their money by having their video card built into pre-built machines. People learned about ATI through their system tray. NVidia was the card for l33t gamers. You used to not be able to get a computer with an NVidia card in it. What's happening is ATI is becoming the L33t gamers card while NVidia is becoming the thing for the average user. But NVidia also makes the ridiculously expensive card for the millionaire gamer. ATI, with the technologically better Radeon is moved into the smaller market.

    Don't believe it? Look at NForce. It's a beautiful thing. It allows for technologies gamers want like dual AGP bandwith to the RAM and AMD processors. While at the same time you can get one that has integrated GeForce4 Video, sound, and ethernet to save the average user money. The best of both worlds. If NVidia was just trying to take the gamers market why would they make a chipset with integrated video?

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  4. Stopped Buying EA Games years ago by zcollier · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how many of us will be completely unaffected by this?

    I vowed never to buy another Electronic Arts game years ago, after they decided that Ultima Online and its patrons deserved to be handled in a cynically condescending and ham-fisted manner. I will never forgive EA for having me pay to play a beta, their game not even living up to the feature set printed on the box.

    From what I hear, their customer support has only gotten worse, not better, as they farm support out internationally, while making it even more difficult to email or call in for support (by not providing such information), let alone overcoming potential language barriers.

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  5. Re:NVidia got itself a good deal by ergo98 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, unfettered market dominance.

    Revisionist history. 3dfx acquired market dominance through superior engineer, and they then lost it when they became business oriented rather than technically oriented. The cross-promotion venture came at a time when everyone was questioning what 3dfx was doing, was question the usefulness of Glide, and generally the anti-3dfx movement had begun. Here's a hilarious thread one usenet that I could look up because I remember having that conversation some 5 years ago (I'm one of the participants in the thread), and it hilariously is an agreement at the time between EA and 3dfx. How ironic.