Mobile Gaming Holds Brighter Future for Nvidia

Recognizing a shift in the gaming industry, Nvidia is allocating resources to better support the mobile sector.

Earlier this year at ECGC 2011, Nvidia's Tony Tamasi pointed to a monster rig sitting on the stage and said there will always be a market for gamers who want the industry's fastest GPUs and CPUs installed in their PCs.

And while Nvidia makes a pretty penny in both the consumer and business markets, the company is now seemingly recognizing the industry's shift over to the mobile and tablet segments. In an exclusive interview with Softpedia, Nvidia's Senior Product PR Manager for notebooks and Tegra Igor Stanek said that Nvidia is now allocating resources to the mobile segments.

According to Stanek, mobile gaming has gotten bigger than desktop PC gaming, as interest in gaming on the go – whether it's on a smartphone, tablet or laptop – is on the rise.

The interview initially focused on Nvidia's gaming laptop efforts, revealing that the company wants to make them more efficient by implementing its Optimus technology. As an example, to preserve battery life, power to the dedicated graphics card in laptops made by Alienware would be cut off when the rig isn't in gaming mode (rather than shift power to the on-board GPU). This should allow for 5 to 6 hours of actual runtime.

Nvidia is also recognizing its tablet and smartphone gamers. Much like it does with the PC sector (Epic Games especially), the GPU manufacturer is reaching out to mobile game developers to help them optimize their software for Tegra SOCs. Stanek points to the Tegra Zone app for Android as an example, indicating that consumers can find optimized games for their Tegra devices rather than sift through apps cluttering the Android Market and Amazon's Appstore.

Stanek added that it will be a while before tablets and mobile phones become proper gaming devices, but it won't be too long before they eclipse the Nintendo 3DS and Sony's upcoming PlayStation Vita. Strangely enough, he even said that they will eventually eclipse the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and the PC itself.

Looking back to the monster gaming rig sitting on the stage at ECGC 2011, and Tony Tamasi saying that there will always be a market for the enthusiast PC gamer, the idea of smartphones and tablets actually eclipsing the PC sector just seems a little farfetched.