Monday, April 30th 2012
NVIDIA Unveils GeForce Experience
NVIDIA unveiled GeForce Experience, a new cloud-based technology that assesses PC hardware and tweaks settings of games to deliver the most optimal gaming experience. GeForce Experience goes a step beyond today's System Requirements Labs applets, and assesses hardware at a much more minute scale, sends information back to a data center that houses supercomputers, which methodically build the perfect game settings for each GPU, CPU, motherboard, and drivers configuration.
Speaking at GeForce LAN Shanghai, NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that PC games require a greater knowledge about the capabilities of the system than required by consoles. To get the most out of PC games, gamers need to dig into its settings and tweak them to work best with the hardware available, and that could be a disadvantage compared to consoles.
According to NVIDIA's statistics, a disturbing 80% of PC gamers don't tinker with their quality settings, and end up with sub-optimal visual experience compared to consoles. In contrast consoles have, since the beginning of their time, been as simple as inserting the game disc/cartridge and pushing the power button. Huang said his crew was looking to take PC gaming as close to that experience as possible, with NVIDIA GeForce Experience.
Source:
The Verge
Speaking at GeForce LAN Shanghai, NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that PC games require a greater knowledge about the capabilities of the system than required by consoles. To get the most out of PC games, gamers need to dig into its settings and tweak them to work best with the hardware available, and that could be a disadvantage compared to consoles.
43 Comments on NVIDIA Unveils GeForce Experience
This is just my opinion of course and another detractor/factor for me to stay away from Nvidia. Hopefully ATi does NOT implement a similar system in the future otherwise we'll all be playing Xbox/PS3 style :cry:
I don't take survey's and i don't submit info. We pay them good $$$ to develop hardware & software, they should earn it :o
Let me know when it will automatically download and install the perfect driver for each app prior to it loading the app when you start it, and then it'll be useful.
Talk about aiming low....:wtf:
Like I said, aiming low. Great ideas, of course, but poor execution. ;)
And it's not "technically"...they ARE "a software company, who also sells hardware". Direct quote.
- It's good for users, because they will get a better experience than what default offers just by pressing a button.
- It is A LOT better for developers, because they will be able to use higher settings and features: those with lower end cards will play on low (unlike today), no need to tweak the default/medium settings so that it runs well on most PCs, aka low end cards. Also new features would make more sense, since they will be used more often by gamers. I didn't know it, but now I know why developers are so reluctant to including new features: maybe even 80% of people who could have used them, don't, even if their hardware could, because they just use the default settings. What's the point of including a feature 80% of people won't use because it can not be the default option?
- Better for PC industry because PC gaming being simpler might attract those who now go with consoles because they perceive it as the easy option.If anything this will make developers more inclined to offer new features, because they will actually be used by most and because no matter what amount of settings the game has, it's not going to overwhelm anyone. Only those who want would need to tweak dozens of different settings. Maybe a lot of developers use very few graphic setting options so as to not overwhelm the mainstream audience, since you can usually still tweak every single feature through the config file.
if you follow the link to the source, it says:@Cadaveca
Also in the source:Isn't that close enough to what you want?
IMO that's better than what you suggest tbh. Come on, isn't it annoying when you just want to play a certain game a few minutes, but Steam wants to patch it? it would be the same and most people would just disable that option by default (which is what I do with nearly ever SP game I own).
The fustrating part about all of this is that, with QA for the most part being outsourced, trying to find ANY external testing company who REALLY knows their stuff regarding gaming and PC hardware compatibility is incredibly difficult. Most will fall into one of two camps:
- Unit testing: Where a "unit", in this case a desktop PC either OEM or hand-built, is used amongst a pool of testers. They then work down a "checklist", most commonly known as a test case, to use during their testing cycle. Typically this the most commonly found kind of hardware compatibility especially in those companies who outsource their QA testing.
- Benchmark testing: This is the lesser known, and based upon my experience dying, example of hardware compatibility testing. This kind of testing is very similar to what hardware reviewers use with a few key differences:
a. It is geared more towards testing the individual hardware components than the overall configuration
b. The tester will have a low (read: min spec), mainstream, and recommended set of configurations. A typical mix of this will have a Intel/NVIDIA "set" of systems and AMD/ATI for the other
c. That, based upon the experience of the tester, will mix and match some configurations to ensure that sticking an NVIDIA video card in an AMD motherboard will not cause a game to choke
The bigger and more well financed QA groups will have an internal team, with a hardware catalog to test with, but sadly this is slowly dying. This is somewhat depressing when I recall having a conversation with a QA outsource vendor the company I was with at the time had a difficult time wrapping their head around identifying performance-related issues and instead just provided "test case results" that centered around the failed "unit" that they were using and left it up to the developer to try and figure out what the issue was. o_O Sadly, the expertise involved with PC hardware testing is not sticking around the industry due to either being laid off in preference to outsource testing (with EA being one of the bigger companies that did away with a good portion of their internal testing teams from what I understand) or the persons with the requesite knowledge not wishing to work the long hours and poor financial benefits to keep the knowledge in the industry.
Everyone should have minimum computing skill's, it only make's sense in a society that is so technology dependant/based.
Take me for example; when i was young and wanted to play games on a PC i had to know some basic coding (Commodore) otherwise i could NOT play! Now i, and million's of other people, just pop in a disc and it does everything for me/us!
Am i smarter now? NO. I am dumber.
If i got into programming this would be moot but as tech matured the need for me to work with programming was removed and i never pursued it because of the lack of a need for it.There is nothing to get over! It was an excellent move for both companies, for me AMD = CPU/APU & ATi = GFX plain and simple.
:D
The first thing I do when I log into a new PC game is turn all graphics settings as high as possible. I never turn any settings down because I have two GTX 580's in SLI.
- Engine programmer asks Compatibility or hardware vendors for list of "hardware identification codes" or in laymans terms the list of video cards that each driver from NVIDIA and ATI ship with.
- Said engine programmer plugs in these codes into the section of the game where the options settings reside; usually in the form of some kind of .INF file
- Once said engine programmer has all of this integrated into the options settings for the game they tie in the default resolution and other settings so that when that video card is identified by the "optimizer" it will populate the settings tagged in the .INF file
Some companies will make some modicum of effort, working with either their internal/external compatibility team or the hardware developers like ATI/NVIDIA, and will use what those groups have found will give what they consider ideal settings for maximum performance and visual quality. The games that you see that ship with some kind of benchmarking tool, like Far Cry or Crysis for example, use what most would consider a fully-functional "optimizer" that uses the in-game benchmarking tool to populate the settings to the .INF file.
Sadly, in most cases the above situations are in the minority, and usually just use the default settings that the game needs to run and leave them alone. The reality is that unless the game is guaranteed to be a AAA title and will sell millions this level of effort will be reserved for those games with all others being left with a feel-good placebo "optimizer" that does nothing. -_-