Gaming evolved
AMD and ATI's three-pronged approach to PC computing - encompassing CPUs, chipsets and graphics - has established itself over the last few years as the budget gamers' champion. Now, the company is going to give a little back to the PC community with the launch of its Gaming Evolved initiative.
While ATI, especially, produces some of the most powerful gaming hardware on the market, the company's support amongst developers has seemingly lagged behind archrival NVIDIA's. Its ‘The Way It's Meant To Be Played' program ensures that games run best on the latest GeForce hardware and take advantage of NVIDIA technologies such as PhysX and 3D Vision. Now AMD's Gaming Evolved looks like it will be trying to woo devs and publishers in much the same way.
Gamers come first
The cornerstone of this new program is that "Gamers Come First". According to the announcement, AMD has a "deep commitment" in bolstering the PC market, providing support to developers and helping to push the latest technologies. In a specific shot across its competitor's bow, the initiative also looks to ‘nurture open industry standards' like OpenCL and OpenGL.
This could all just be marketing bravado, but hopefully the company will genuinely support the PC gaming community. The growth of consoles over the last few years, among other things, has had the effect of marginalising PC gaming and pushing some developers away to other, more lucrative platforms. If AMD can help to bring triple-A titles back to the computer, its efforts will benefit all PC gamers. We also appreciate the company's commitment to open standards that everyone, regardless of hardware, can take advantage of.
Unfortunately, details on the new program are limited, but we're sure that we'll hear plenty more as the company manages to get some high-profile developers on board.
