I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.

Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.

More stuff after the jump.

Another Maximum PC review: the MSI R5870 Lightning. It’s one of the latest generation of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards meant to be tweaked. I find these sorts of cards interesting as engineering exercises, but ultimately too expensive with too little performance gain for most users.

Over at PC World, I wrote an article on painless motherboard upgrades — how to upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. I’ve also written a number of laptop reviews, including the Micro Express NBL60, a surprisingly good unit from a manufacturer that doesn’t get a lot of buzz. Also at PC World is the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook. Alas, that’s an earlier model, and lacks the new GeForce GTX 480 mobile GPUs.

I also had some fun appearing on a couple of Tekzilla episodes with Patrick Norton. I appeared on Episode 147, where I talk about Puget Systems Serenity quiet gaming system. It’s a reasonably high performance box, but only generates around 20dBA even under load. Patrick and I also go back and forth on how you might mod your system to make it less noisy.

In addition, I got to do a bit on their fifth anniversary show, where I doff my PC hardware cap and put on my geeky photographer hat and talk a bit about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 release.

Last, but not least (and maybe the most fun), was making a guest appearance on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead, a podcast focusing on strategy gaming (mostly PC, but Troy also delves into board games occasionally, and his regulars –Rob Zacny, Julian Murdoch and others — also take on console and handheld strategy games. We talked about the impact technology has had on strategy games.

So that’s what’s been going on inside and outside the basement lab recently. Hope you find it as much fun to read, watch and hear as I had working on them.

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.

The Edge of the Envelope

While Nvidia has pushed the edge of the envelope in some key technologies, they’ve also been innovative in other areas. Viral marketing, rather than big advertising campaigns, were one hallmark. Marketing was a relatively lean operation, and often focused at the needs of developers over flashy ad campaigns. In that respect, Nvidia is much like Microsoft. (This is a compliment, not an insult, by the way. One of the reasons for Microsoft’s success is its strong focus on making life easier for developers. The more apps, the more OS sales, after all.)

As a technology analyst, they’ve been a mixed bag to work with. For one thing, the corporate culture seems to be pretty thin-skinned. When I was the EIC at ExtremeTech, any comment that could possibly be interpreted as negative would result in an email or phone call. The PR team can be somewhat prickly at time. Some of this is historical. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used to tell company meetings that they were “nine months from going out of business.”

Any company that’s told it’s constantly teetering on the brink will naturally develop something of a bunker mentality over time. After all, it’s them against the world.

At one point in time, that was true. When they launched the project to develop the original RIVA128, they had about nine months of capital left. That chip set something of a record from inception to shipment. But that herculean effort has also been something of a historical albatross around the company’s neck.

Some of the aggressiveness and breakneck development pace is the nature of the business, of course. The pace of improvements in 3D graphics hardware for PCs in the past decade has been pretty breathtaking, and the competition fierce. I was actually working for Nvidia when ATI (then independent of AMD) launched the Radeon 9700, completely catching Nvidia off guard with its level of performance.

It seems to be a cyclical thing. Nvidia pushes out very cool GPUs at key generational points – typically, a new release of DirectX. Then Nvidia proceeds to crank out slightly updated versions of the same hardware for the next several years. This last product cycle more so: the company pumped out rebadged and slightly enhanced versions of the G92, than anything in the past. Clearly, Nvidia was looking to G92 to carry their mainstream line forward for a substantial interval.

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.

The edge PCs had in terms of superior capability as seen by users seems to be slowly changing. That’s not to say that current generation graphics hardware isn’t better. There’s no question a Radeon HD 4890 or GeForce 285 GTX offers graphics performance and feature sets well beyond what consoles can deliver. However, developers don’t seem to want to put the effort into making their games look better.

Some of this is because all games are multiplatform now, so a developer will want to maintain a consistent asset pipeline. Another factor is the increasing fragmentation of the PC gaming market. I’m firmly believe that PC gaming will fluorish, but it will consist of many forms: MMOs, web-only games, classic PC games and so on. But AAA titles now need to be multiplatform to maximize success. Toss in the fact that a game on a modern console (with the possible exception of the Wii, which has different strengths) can look very good, indeed. The incentive to make your PC game look hugely better is diminished.

That means the GPU makers are between a rock and a hard place. In some sense, AMD got it right — built GPUs that are “good enough” and affordable. Nvidia’s 285 GTX is more a classic “big iron” GPU, which is expensive to build. (Full disclosure: my primary desktop system has a factory overclocked eVGA 285 GTX.) If PC game devs no longer want to put the effort into building the next super-duper DX11 game, why would anyone buy a DX11 graphics card?

I’m sure the marketing and tech guys at Nvidia and AMD (oh, and Intel, of course), are thinking long and hard about this conundrum. While GPU computing will help sell more GPUs, it still won’t solve the problem of giving developers incentives to make PC games that look better and play better than console games — which is what I’d like to see.