What’s Going on with Nvidia?
Before I dive into this analysis, a bit of disclosure is in order: I worked at Nvidia briefly (roughly nine months) back in 2000, prior to leaving to help launch ExtremeTech.
Nvidia is one of those companies that I have a somewhat bipolar relationship with. On the one hand, they’re technology driven, have a large percentage of the best 3D graphics architects under one roof and have, in the past, constantly pushed the edge of the envelope, both in technology and in marketing. They’ve driven some important and cool technologies in the past decade.
As with any fast growing technology company, though, Nvidia is more complicated than just being a cool tech company.
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I started writing about technology back in the mid-1990s, writing some of the first hardware reviews for gamers in the old Computer Gaming World. Over the years, one of the constants in the game business is the constant tussle between console gaming and PC gaming.
Consoles have an edge for several reasons. Marketing support and developer assistance from the console companies is one. But the big deal is the known, consistent platform. When a game console ships, it’s good for at least five years. It’s possible that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will last longer than five years. Having a consistent platform makes issue like debugging easier from the developer perspective. From the gamer perspective, persistent platform problems (eg, graphics and sound drivers) are not an issue.
PCs have had the edge in overall bleeding edge performance. At some point in the console life cycle, PC games often look substantially better in the eye candy department, and developers can do more stuff with a PC than they can with a console.
That dynamic seems to be shifting.
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