Having the world’s fastest car is no fun unless you have the right racetrack. If that track does not exist, then you will need to build it. For cars, that means splashing out on a Nürburgring or something similar. With graphic cards, it means having a triple A title that pushes everything you do well, to the absolute limit. Enter EA.
With the GTX480, nVidia had a massive lead in graphics processing techniques like tessellation. Unfortunately, there were almost no games in the market that utilised that additional processing power. Aliens Vs Predator included tessellation – but just enough to allow AMD and nVidia to compete on a similar playing field. Great for gamers, not so good for nVidia. Millions have been paid to create a Fermi processor with butt-mastering tessellation capability, which isn’t being utilised by game developers. What a quandary. How to fix it?
Enter Crysis 2 and a $2m spend from nVidia’s marketing team.
