Nvidia announces GeForce Experience tech to simplify, optimize PC gaming

At its pre-CES press conference, Nvidia unveiled a new technology suite called GeForce Experience designed to simplify and optimize PC gaming, boasting "console simplicity" married with "PC performance."

Prior to announcing GeForce Experience, Nvidia CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang spoke of the lack of standardized video game entertainment across a variety of PC hardware. Whereas movies, music and books can offer a similar experience on multiple hardware configurations, the same is not always true for video games, Huang said.

PC gaming, "as wonderful as it is," is also "awfully chaotic," Huang said. "The game console is always stable, one single configuration."

To help address that, Nvidia created GeForce Experience, cloud-based "technology that makes it possible for you to set the [video settings of] games automatically within your PC."

"We start by understanding the profile of every single game," Huang said. "We know through heuristics, benchmarks, by studying the install base [...] we can figure out which to prioritize for. Then we have expert gamers play through the games to find out what the optimal settings are."

To showcase GFE, Huang showed "standard, out-of-the-box settings" running on the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Then, using GeForce Experience optimization, he showed the graphically optimized version, with higher resolution textures, improved resolution and greater levels of detail, without needing to dive into the in-game settings.

We'll have more from Nvidia's offerings at CES later this week.