14 DAY TRIAL // During Gamescom 2011, Nvidia held its own presentation, as the graphics company wanted to highlight where it believes gaming is going and how it plans to help get it there, with new technology and better developer support.
Nvidia has been relentless in its PC gaming push, launching new graphics cards, partnering up with developers and helping them use the Physx technology, as well as bringing custom support for big games.
Besides that, however, the company is allocating resources for other gaming segments, including tablet and mobile ones, according to Igor Stanek, Senior Product PR Manager Notebooks and Tegra, who presented during a private meeting the hopes, aspirations and concrete plans of the company, exclusively to Softpedia.
While desktop PC gaming will still be an important area for Nvidia, mobile gaming is even bigger, as the interest in gaming on the go, whether on laptops, tablets or mobile phones, is on the rise.
As such, the graphics company wants to make gaming laptops more efficient, with the help of the Optimus technology, which allows such devices made by Alienware, for example, to completely cut off power from the dedicated graphics card, instead shifting it to the onboard one. As such, when the laptop isn’t used for actual gaming, the battery will finally last more than just a couple of hours, reaching 5 or 6 hours of runtime.
But, while this is great for those who spend big bucks on gaming laptops, Nvidia is certain that tablets will be even more profitable, as people are finally realizing the importance and versatility of devices like the iPad or Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1. In order to help them, Nvidia is investing heavily in its Tegra business, which powers many of the tablets that are currently running Android Honeycomb operating systems.
Besides offering full support for hardware manufacturers like Samsung, Toshiba or Asus, Nvidia is also going straight to mobile games developers, helping them get the most out of the graphics capabilities of tablets or mobile phones that are running on Tegra.
As a concrete example, the company is now maintaining its own Tegra Zone application, which makes finding games optimized for the technology on the Android Market easier, and even supplies more information about them in the form a dedicated news portal.
Basically, if Tegra device owners want to make sure that they get the best games for their device, and don’t want to wrestle with the Android Market, the Tegra Zone is a great solution.
While there’s still quite a lot to go until tablets and mobile phones start becoming proper gaming device, Nvidia is certain that they’ll get there soon, and eclipse, at first, portable games consoles like the Nintendo 3DS or PlayStation Vita, and then full pledge home devices, like the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, and even the PC.
We have a special page with all our Gamescom 2011 coverage.