Today, NVIDIA announced a new program to help game developers effectively use NVIDIA hardware called GameWorks. The thing that excites me the most about GameWorks is the inclusion of Optix in a program that directly targets game developers. Optix is a ray tracing environment developed by people I know from my studies at Utah that has previously been used to help develop rendering engines for design and production environments. This recent announcement means that the important global illumination features that work more naturally in ray tracing will be more readily available for game developers. I expect it will still be a couple of years before any top games are released using ray tracing in the real time rendering engine, but this represents a clear step in the right direction.
Also today, NVIDIA announced game bundles and $50-$100 discounts to the SHIELD handheld game system for people who also purchase a Geforce GTX graphics card. Finally, a new technology called G-SYNC was announced that allows the GPU to refresh the monitor at a variable refresh rate, more closely tying the visuals coming from your display to the underlying game engine. Oh, and one more interesting note, NVIDIA also expressed direct interest in supporting SteamOS when it launches, indicating that Linux graphics drivers should continue to be a priority for the company.