Developer March

OFF THE PRESS

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Moblin v2.1 Project Release for Netbooks and Nettops Released Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops release...

WHITE PAPERS

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EXCLUSIVES

Game Development Spawns cool Engineers

Ashu Rege is Director of Content and Technology at Nvidia managing the Content Management, Evangelism, Developer Technology, PhysX and APEX groups. He is an expert on games, graphics, geometric modeling, AI, error-correction codes and networking among other areas. Keita Iida has been part of Nvidia's Content & Technology organization since 2001, working with software developers and publishers to ensure that games and applications are well-aligned with Nvidia graphics and platform technologies. He is also a video game historian, contributing to several books on this subject as well as being cited by CNN, USA Today and others as an expert voice in the field.

When Saltmarch quizzed Keita on the significance video games have on the society in general he said that game development has finally managed to make engineers ‘cool’ and has very successfully added a fun element to engineering as a whole. Ashu agreed and said video games have had many positive social implications and may have even enabled a ‘one-world-community’. Both of them cited several examples where video games have driven technological innovation and how those technologies are now being implemented in various fields of scientific and medical research, cancer research and even video decoding and encoding amongst others.

The discussion gradually moved on to the much expected release of Nvidia’s Fermi architecture based GPUs. Ashu made it clear that Nvidia is very excited about these products and that he firmly believes the Fermi architecture can truly exploit the possibilities of the latest Direct X 11. While he left it to the independent reviewers to decide how these GPUs will fare against ATI’S HD5800 rival series, he is confident that Fermi will reign supreme. He added that Direct X 11 will be the deciding factor for GPU sales in the years to come and that it will be the benchmark for all next generation consoles and games.

It is a common belief that modern games are getting too dependent on high end hardware and that only means more cost pushed on to the consumer to buy these hardware. Keita put this notion to rest, saying that Nvidia caters to all hardware segments within the PC industry and that they are constantly thriving to achieve higher than expected quality even on their mid-level range of products. He asserted that consumers need to give GPUs a little more consideration while investing on a PC and how that will exponentially increase their PC's performance.

Nvidia had developed custom low power and low heat dissipating chipsets for Chinese internet café owners who wanted a drastic reduction in their electricity consumption. When asked about the company's plans on differentiating products for India specifically, Keita said that there are no such plans currently. Nvidia will create custom solutions for this market when an opportunity and a sizable opportunity presents itself

During the course of the interview Ashu also explained how the acquisition of AEGIA benefited Nvidia and what the world expects from Indian game developers in the years to come. Click here to watch the full interview.

VIDEOS

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PODCAST&VIDEOS

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