Nvidia offers entree to the World of Warcraft beta

Nvidia announced today that it is teaming up with Blizzard Entertainment to add World of Warcraft, the high-profile massively multiplayer role-playing game, to Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant to Be Played" program, which also includes Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry.

Under the program, Blizzard will optimize World of Warcraft for Nvidia hardware, providing for easy installation and compatibility with a long list of graphics cards from the GeForce 6800 series to the GeForce 2. The two companies will then cooperatively market the game leading up to its release this winter.

"The investment we're making with Blizzard in compatibility will pay out in spades as soon as the legions of gamers go from install to play quickly and effortlessly," said Bill Rehbock, general manager of content development at Nvidia.

To publicize the deal, Blizzard will give away 1,000 accounts for the World of Warcraft closed beta test to randomly selected gamers. According to the two companies, sign-ups start today and will last for a week or until all places are spoken for.

A few months ago, GameSpot went exploring in World of Warcraft--read our feature to learn more.