It always been about what you stated. Christ, when me and my buddy ran the intel gaming DRG lab in 1997 we were testing all games (this is when SIMD came out, and we proposed stacking cores... but thats a different story) against optimizing (specifically Intel wanted to pay game companies to optimize against SIMD, and would give them $1MM for marketing if it could be proven the game (subjectivly) ran better on their Celeron processors vs AMDs anything... so they were paying devs to opt for the SIMD instructions and then using that as marketing material... it was a fun job.
aside: That was my personal golden age of gaming... Intel had an OC-48 to SC-5 building... so playing UO on 6 machines simultaneously when everyone else was modeming at 56K made us like gods against lag in that game... I still think fondly of that time.
Hmm, that's interesting. I've noticed that with the new 1000 line, NVIDIA has been giving away some games as an incentive. Every single time I've seen it, it's been a ubisoft game. There was probably a similar deal with Ubisoft this gen. Otherwise why would they be promoting those games so much?
aside: That was my personal golden age of gaming... Intel had an OC-48 to SC-5 building... so playing UO on 6 machines simultaneously when everyone else was modeming at 56K made us like gods against lag in that game... I still think fondly of that time.