Well, Epic's Mark Rein has once again devastated PC users . He has denied us Gears of War. He shall pay! Anyway, all this started when someone noticed in a new set of Nvidia drivers that there was an entry for "Gears of War" and so, instead of actually contacting Mark Rein (or CliffyB) about it, people naturally reported that Gears of War was indeed heading to the PC. Many PC users rejoiced and jumped up and down rapidly. Now we have our hopes dashed yet again:
There is no "new information" that Gears will be released on PC. You know console games are developed on PCs, right? Even if we never release Gears of War on PC we still need to run the game on PC to develop and test content for it.
Our first E3 demo, over two years ago, was done on an PC equipped with dual NVIDIA graphics cards. That was how we simulated the power of Xbox 360 before there was actually a real Xbox 360 to run on.
We gave NVIDIA a copy of wargame.exe (along with some sample content from Gears) so they could help us tweak Unreal Engine 3 performance and reliability on NVIDIA graphics chips. That was necessary to make the development tools perform well and ensure that their drivers would support UE3 going forward. That was beneficial because two PC games (Roboblitz and Rainbow Six Vegas) have already shipped for PC and we're planning to ship our next Unreal Tournament game on PC this year as well.
So in reality the only thing this supposed "leak" demonstrates is that we work closely with NVIDIA to ensure the best possible performance for our engine on their platforms. Ditto for ATI and other graphics vendors as well.
For the rest of his statement, head on over to the official Epic Forums post he made about this situation.
Link: Voodoo Extreme
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