Or that Nvidia has been paying too little and relied more heavily on their market share leader halo to get developers to code for them.I agree it's basically a guarantee that AMD is paying a lot of money for this level of exclusivity,
What I don't get is how this can be happening. AMD has so completely outmanoeuvred Nvidia in gaming it's almost impossible to believe.
Did the Nvidia money just dry up, or have they pissed off the devs with Shield or what?
There would have to be some significant compensation to EA in order for it to accept the blowback of guaranteeing game quality issues for a significant fraction of the PC market, or EA just cares that little about the PC market.
My first guess is that they're being paid for this exclusivity, and/or AMD is agreeing to do a lot of co-developing of the software.
[URL=http://techreport.com/news/24976/bf4-other-frostbite-3-games-to-be-optimized-exclusively-for-amd]The Tech Report[/URL] said:Update: Frostbite Technical Director Johan Andersson has posted on Twitter that the IGN story is "not true." He says a statement is coming to correct the apparent error, but it doesn't look like the IGN story has been updated with a correction yet. We'll keep an eye on it and update this story as it develops. Thanks to TR commenter JohnC for the tip.
Update 2: The IGN story has now been updated with an official statement indicating that DICE's partnership with AMD "does not exclude DICE from working with other partners to ensure players have a great experience across a wide set of PCs for all their titles." Additionally, AMD says its Gaming Evolved program "undertakes no efforts to prevent our competition from optimizing for games before their release." Nvidia should have early access to Battlefield 4 and other Frostbite-powered titles, allowing GeForce drivers to be optimized before games are released.
As I suspected, the answer is simpler: IGN's story is just bullshit.
That's too bad for AMD: you only get the chance to twirl your mustache and laugh evily once in a great while.
True, but they've been pretty clear, and on multiple occasions, that they don't do that sort of thing. If they went back on their word now, it might do irreparable damage to their brand—not worth the extra revenue that might be generated from NVIDIA's potential bugs in the first few weeks following a few game launches.
A 13.3 inch "affordable" ultraportable doesn't really need a 1080p resolution. Sure my 11.6" Helix screen has 1080p but that things horribly expensive.
When your boss comes and says, 'Why have you got this graphics card that's the size of a fridge?' you can say, 'My spreadsheet has got to get faster.'"