NVIDIA and Ubisoft Form Gaming Alliance To Enhance Top Titles

Hot on the heels of Microsoft and Gameloft's partnership comes this: an alliance between NVIDIA and Ubisoft. Announced at Gamescom this week, the two mainstays have decided to partner up in order to bolster Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Watch_Dogs with NVIDIA-developed technologies and features, and other PC-exclusive enhancements like DirectX 11-powered Tessellation.The first Ubisoft title to benefit from this alliance is Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist, which launches worldwide this week with NVIDIA TXAA, NVIDIA HBAO+, and full support for NVIDIA SLI.

NVIDIA TXAA is a PC-exclusive film-style Anti-Aliasing (AA) technique designed specifically to tackle temporal aliasing, the visible movement of anti-aliased edges when the camera or player’s viewpoint is in motion. Combining hardware AA techniques, custom CG movie-style AA resolves and a temporal filter, TXAA creates a clear, smooth image that is free from almost all aliasing, edge crawling, and flickering, which is particularly noticeable when viewing fine detail, motes and other particle effects without the aid of TXAA.


TXAA is the only temporal anti-aliasing technique available on any gaming platform, and is exclusive to GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series users. Please note, the new GeForce 326.80 beta drivers are required for optimum TXAA performance in Blacklist. Tony Key, senior vice president of Sales and Marketing at Ubisoft, believes that “combining NVIDIA’s visual computing expertise and the creativity of our development teams will give customers a stunning experience when choosing an Ubisoft game.” Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at NVIDIA, added that NVIDIA has “worked closely with Ubisoft’s incredibly talented creative team throughout the development process to incorporate our technologies and deliver the most immersive and visually spectacular game worlds imaginable.”


As usual, we're expecting this to be the start of a long and fruitful relationship. Great for gamers, but bad for wallets -- after all, it'll end up costing you to keep pace with the new tech being established. But hey, that's graphical progress for you!