Origin PC is a well known systems builder based in the US, also with branches in Australia and Hong Kong. The firm specialises in gaming systems and these systems have, over the years, won many awards from the likes of Anandtech, CNet and Playboy magazine. Earlier in the week we revealed Origin PC is on board with Nvidia and will be producing 4K gaming systems under the Nvidia Battle Box GeForce GTX label. Now it has been revealed that Origin PC is going to go 100 per cent over to the green team – “going forward, all Origin PC computers will contain Nvidia graphics chips,” reports Polygon games magazine.
Kevin Wasielewski, co-founder and CEO of Origin PC, wrote about the reasons for the move in an email. “Origin PC is dedicated to providing the best experience for our customers and right now that is with Nvidia GPUs. It's not about brand loyalty or marketing; our loyalty is 100 percent to our customers,” he explained.
Other factors influencing the PC maker’s decision were said to be “requests from Origin's own support staff, as well as specific concerns with the performance, stability and driver support of AMD graphics hardware,” wrote Polygon. Obviously an impartial observer can see how this move will benefit support staff that will, in the future, have a less diverse set of PCs to trouble-shoot.
Further information about the background to Origin PC’s decision to exclusively equip Nvidia GPUs was provided by Alvaro Masis, a technical support manager at Origin. “Primarily the overall issues have been stability of the cards, overheating, performance, scaling and the amount of time to receive new drivers on both desktop and mobile GPUs,” said Masis.
This move by Origin PC is, at the very least, a big PR blow to AMD in the large US market. We have also just heard that the Steam Machine prototypes will be exclusively Nvidia GPU equipped machines. However AMD might be able to blow this bad news out of the water very soon if its latest graphics card range hits the right performance and price sweetspots. Also with AMD’s APUs in the upcoming next generation consoles a lot of big name games (like Battlefield 4) are going to be optimised better for the red team, using GCN and Mantle. It will be very interesting to see how long Origin PC's green team allegiance lasts.
