NVIDIA nTeresting News: 25 November 2011

In this Issue:

• Batman: Arkham City is out and awesome on GeForce GTX.
• HardOCP reviews show that GeForce GTX is best for just about every game.
• Ice Cream Sandwich is running solid in just 2 days.
• CUDA turns 5. Happy Birthday.
• Trine 2 is glorious in 3D.

Holy GeForce Batman!

The next blockbuster title,Batman: Arkham City, released this week for the PC. Batman: Arkham City is chocked full of GeForce goodness like PhysX, 3D Vision, Surround, FXAA, and SLI! See it in all its glory in this side by side video or see it here in 3D.

Only GeForce GTX can deliver the full immersive experience from these great technologies.

When you Gear Up for Batman, keep in mind that several of NVIDIA's partners are offering a free copy of the game. EVGA even has its own Batman: Arkham City-themed GeForce GTX 580-based card.

GeForce GTX is Best for (FILL IN ANY GAME TITLE)

HardOCP does their testing a little differently than other websites. They do not rely on canned benchmarks or synthetic benchmarks to tell them which GPU is best. To see which video cards are best for games they sit down and play games. With the flood of titles that are hitting for the holidays, HardOCP has been busy. This week they checked out Battlefield 3 multiplayer.

"Throughout all of our testing it was apparent that the NVIDIA GPU based video cards were providing better performance and more enjoyable gameplay than the AMD GPU based video cards. There were no instances that we found where any AMD card provided better gameplay performance than its NVIDIA counterpart. We also experienced an issue which we believe to be driver related with all AMD video cards. We experienced an extremely noticeable lag any time there was a large amount of debris flying around, explosions from missiles, grenades or vehicles, or buildings in the environment being destroyed. This was not present on any of the NV based GPUs."

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the most popular game on Steam this week.

"We witnessed the very best performance with a pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580s installed and operating in SLI mode. After that, the single GeForce GTX 580 was the best performer, followed by the GeForce GTX 570. AMD video cards have some performance issues in Skyrim, and we do hope that AMD can improve this with driver updates. It would be difficult to recommend an AMD video card to any gamer looking to upgrade his or her computer in order to play Skyrim. For this game at least, NVIDIA-GPU based current generation video cards is where it's at, whether you are packing a 30" monitor running at 2560x1600, a 1080p panel, or a multi-monitor gaming solution, they are simply faster."

Deus Ex has a deal with AMD, so surely they have an advantage in this one.

"After all of our tests we found the NVIDIA GPU based video cards performed better than the AMD GPU based video cards in this new game. All the NVIDIA based GPU's handled the high tessellation close up cut-scene conversations between characters extremely well. The AMD based GPUs struggled in the conversation cut-scenes, but were still able to provide playable performance."

What about Rage from id Software?

"The NVIDIA GPU based video cards came out of testing as very clear winners in this game. Performance was exceptional, and they support the texture transcoding on the GPU feature by way of NVIDIA's CUDA technology. All three NVIDIA video cards were capable of playing RAGE at 2560x1600 with 8X AA, 16X AF, Large Texture Cache, and GPU Transcode enabled. The GTX 580, GTX 570, and GTX 560 Ti all put in very close performances due to the 60FPS performance cap in RAGE."

AMD must win in F1 2011, because that is another AMD promoted title.

"NVIDIA cards outperformed AMD's offerings in every test we executed."

In one game after another GeForce GTX delivers while other GPUs fall short.

"We have harped over this before, but this game shows once again that AMD's driver support is biting it in the butt on a new game release. With not even an ETA on a new CAP for Skyrim to support CrossFireX, and no performance driver in sight, it is rather depressing for AMD GPU owners. We keep seeing this with new game launches these past few months. Rage, Deus Ex: Missing Link, even Battlefield 3 had better and working performance and SLI drivers from NVIDIA on game day launch, while AMD support was lacking."

If you want the best gaming experience in the all the cool games coming out for the holidays, you better Gear up with GeForce GTX.

Tegra 3 + ‘Ice Cream Sandwich' + Transformer Prime

The quad-core Tegra 3 processer makes the Transformer Prime the world's first quad-core tablet. This week TF Prime hit the web in a video showing it running the newest version of Android -- Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). This video was recorded on Nov 16, just two days after Google released ICS source code.

"NVIDIA's highly talented software team had ICS up and running on the Prime in only 2 days. Even though this is an early demo and not a completely ready for public version, it runs pretty awesome already."

Even in that short time frame it is running with absolute stability, and even delivers flawless 1080p high profile video playback and kicks ass on a quad-core optimized version of Riptide GP.

"And more than it's running, it's actually running really well and smooth despite how early it is."

Google's done a great job on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and has made it open and easy for the ecosystem to access and develop on. NVIDIA also has a very experienced software team, built from years of optimizing work on the PC and graphics side, who worked with ASUS to bring ICS to the Transformer Prime quad-core tablet.

Happy Birthday to CUDA

It has been 5 years since NVIDIA first pioneered the use of GPU for stuff besides gaming. We kicked it off by giving people a development platform called CUDA to harness the power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems. NVIDIA's Ian Buck discuss in this video.

Trine Comes Back Around

A year or so ago we introduced you to Trine, a very fun and original platformer by a developer called FrozenByte. They added 3D Vision support as a patch and our users responded very positively, some calling it the best 3D game they have ever played.

The sequel that is available as a Beta now on Steam, and will be shipping in early December, and FrozenByte released a patch for last Friday that added 3D Vision support. You can check it out now on 3DVisionLive.com.