Meltdown MO: making friends and influencing developers

SEATTLE--Microsoft isn't the only company with a stake in PC gaming. Graphics card and peripheral makers are every bit as eager to promote PC games, and they've joined Microsoft here at Meltdown, its annual conference for developers of Windows (as Microsoft staffers are prone to say) games. GameSpot spent the morning talking to leading graphics card makers Nvidia, ATI, Intel, and Logitech about their activities at the Seattle conference sponsored by Microsoft and about how they work with developers to promote their products.

We chatted first with Nvidia. Developer support is a key theme at Meltdown, and Nvidia's efforts in this area provide an interesting look at the high-end graphics card business. To a much greater extent than Microsoft's revenues, Nvidia's revenues are tied to a steady flow of new games. Regular releases of graphics-intensive games push gamers to upgrade their graphics cards. The company has decided that aggressively supporting developers who are working on this kind of game is a better bet than investing all of its time in developing new GPUs.

Nvidia supports developers in two ways. First, it troubleshoots for games in development: The company has several teams of technology consultants who make onsite visits to help developers solve graphics card issues. Second, it creates developer tools, which the company distributes for free to game developers.

During our visit with Nvidia, its engineers (shown above) showed us one of its developer tools, a performance-analysis tool called NVPerfHUD (see the screenshot library), which gave us an interesting look into the process of game development. NVPerfHUD shows GPU performance data while a game is running. The utility allows programmers to toggle textures and effects on and off, identifying which parts of the game cause the heaviest load on the graphics card. Optimizing the code for these bottleneck features will improve performance for the whole game.

ATI was just down the hall, so we visited that company next. ATI has its own set of free developer tools, and a tool called RenderMonkey was presented in one of the Meltdown workshops. During our talk with the ATI representatives, they brought up a point that Nvidia had also mentioned: Development tools can be a tricky area of operations for a graphics card maker. Other companies--most notably Microsoft--are developing their own free tools, while smaller software companies are trying to make a business out of selling their development tools. It's important not to step on any toes.

ATI approaches the problem matter-of-factly by discussing its plans with the other tool suppliers. In fact, the company will even encourage other organizations to create tools for which it sees a clear need. ATI's interest is ensuring that the tool is available, not producing the tool itself: The company is happy if there's no need to fund development.

We then talked with graphics card manufacturer Intel. That's right, Intel. It's easy to forget that the same company that dominates the CPU market is also a big player in GPUs. In fact, as a number of presenters at Meltdown have pointed out, Intel's integrated graphics chips have more market share than any other graphics card.

According to representatives though, the company has no plans to move to the high-end cards that are the territory of ATI and Nvidia. Instead, the inclusion of basic graphics capabilities is just the latest step in a trend toward integration on motherboards and processors. Network interface cards are being superseded by onboard network adaptors; motherboards with onboard audio are common; and now bare-bones 3D graphics capabilities through integrated GPUs are standard for new computers. The strategy of simplifying configuration of new PCs for nontechnical users is closely aligned with Microsoft's push to expand the audience for PC games: Simplicity is the key to bringing in new users.

During our chat, we were interested to hear that onboard graphics chips are more capable than we'd expected. While they won't win any benchmarking tests, they will play most games at acceptable frame rates, and Intel's testing with one upcoming release suggests that the current generation of onboard graphics chips can handle even the most GPU-intensive games, albeit at reduced levels of detail.

Our last manufacturer for the day was Logitech. A number of Microsoft presentations have mentioned developing a Windows standard for game controllers--a key area for Logitech. When asked for an opinion, Logitech revealed that it's collaborating on the project but declined to provide details. Logitech also provided some insight on the testing process that's a key impetus for traveling to Meltdown.

The Logitech theory (which can be applied to most of the vendors in attendence) is as follows: Companies with products in development--whether graphics cards, controllers, or software--are understandably concerned with keeping them under wraps until release. So how can a game developer securely test an alpha build on a prototype graphics card? The developer could hand-carry a copy of its game to the graphics card manufacturer, but with multiple graphics card makers and multiple game developers, this is too inefficient. So conferences like Meltdown provide an opportunity for hardware and software makers to meet in one place and test new products for compatability, knowing that engineers from both sides are on hand to help work through any problems.