Under the terms of the deal, NVIDIA will supply EA’s developers with GeForce FX hardware, and presumably with early access to later chipsets (such as the NV35, which may be announced at E3), in return for which the graphics vendor has exclusive access to EA software for bundle deals.
What the company is really keen to emphasise in its official announcement about the new partnership, though, is that EA has pledged to ensure that its games work better with NVIDIA graphics chips. However, before anyone leaps to wild conclusions (as some online news sources already have), this certainly doesn’t mean that EA games will work exclusively on NVIDIA cards, and nor does it mean that EA games will work badly on ATI cards or other competing graphics cards.
In effect, the announcement is simply that EA is going to try and make its games work well on a leading brand of graphics chipset – which, when you think about it, isn’t exactly exciting news. Most PC owners would be rather miffed if they didn’t try and make the next Medal of Honor work well on NVIDIA cards, after all.
Meanwhile, ATI continues to maintain a solid lead over NVIDIA in terms of raw hardware power with the Radeon 9800 card, although as mentioned above, E3 may change the playing field here once again. However, talk of key publishers or games going NVIDIA exclusive is pure speculation at present and highly unlikely at that – not least because Microsoft is certain to stamp on any attempt by either company to break compatibility with DirectX 9 in an attempt to edge out the competition.
Certainly, the graphics chipset race is hotter now than it has been for several years – and for NVIDIA to score an exclusive bundling deal with EA is a major coup – but the prospect of another standards war such as that precipitated by 3DFX when they introduced the GLIDE proprietary programming interface is incredibly unlikely.
Source: Gamesindustry.biz
