Thursday, January 7th 2016
NVIDIA Announces Rise of the Tomb Raider Bundle
The turnaround in developer relations for NVIDIA, propelled by its GameWorks software and a refreshed "The Way It's Meant to be Played" (TWIMTBP) program is best exemplified with the upcoming "Rise of the Tomb Raider." A sequel to the 2013 franchise reboot by Square Enix, which brandished the "AMD Game!" logo, and even bundled with certain AMD Radeon graphics cards; the new Tomb Raider not only features the NVIDIA logo, but will also be bundled with select GeForce graphics cards under the new "Discover the Legend Within" bundle.
NVIDIA is giving away "Rise of the Tomb Raider" with GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980, and GTX 970 graphics cards. This includes cards sold in the retail channel, as well as gaming desktops that come with those cards pre-installed. On the notebook front, select notebooks running the GTX 980, GTX 980M, and GTX 970M will also give you a key to the game. The bundle extends to participating retailers and OEMs only.
NVIDIA is giving away "Rise of the Tomb Raider" with GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980, and GTX 970 graphics cards. This includes cards sold in the retail channel, as well as gaming desktops that come with those cards pre-installed. On the notebook front, select notebooks running the GTX 980, GTX 980M, and GTX 970M will also give you a key to the game. The bundle extends to participating retailers and OEMs only.
10 Comments on NVIDIA Announces Rise of the Tomb Raider Bundle
If you're developing a game or any really complex program, just getting the thing to work (and ironing out bugs) is difficult enough. I don't think any dev will go out of his/her way to make sure performance is better on one manufacturer's cards.
Async shaders were one of the technics highlighted for improved performance as well as a better AO developed in-house. The bundle news leaked that Nvidia VXAO is being used for the PC version. If you can switch between the original and this that be great but we have to see what becomes of the deal. If nothing was stripped or replaced and Nvidia features added as a option that would be best outcome.
Take async shaders - from what I understand (and I only read about it briefly so I could be wrong), it lets commands get executed in parallel. But what if execution order of the commands ends up changing the output some of the time? Tracking that down could be a pain.
I think part of the problem might be that game developers are under a lot more time pressure than other devs, to meet things like holiday deadlines. So, just getting the thing working and released would be prioritized over non-core features, and perhaps even over stability (as we saw with some recent games).