Watch out Valve and AMD! Nvidia has just unveiled their new Battleboxes, tower PCs built to survive an apocalypse, or at least the next decade of PC gaming. In essence, these are the most top of the line gaming PCs available.
These Battleboxes are being made in partnership with several major bespoke PC manufacturers, including Falcon Northwest, Digital Storm, and Maingear. They will also have Nvidia’s best graphics cards, with a minimum of the GeForce Titan or GTX 780, running on a scalable link interface, and provided with Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and possibly more RAM than they could ever need.
Nvidia says these Battleboxes will output in 4K at 45 to 60 frames per second, and that it is optimized for all of Nvidia’s proprietary tech, including PhysX and TXAA anti aliasing.
Now, getting the most out of these computers would set you back a bit extra for a 4K monitor, but to be fair, the considerable graphical upgrades are noticeable even when you connect them to 1080p monitors.
Of course, this is a semi threat to Valve, but not really, as enterprising fans can simply choose to load their Battleboxes with Steam or Steam OS. In fact, Nvidia has been working behind the scenes with Steam in developing SteamOS, promising optimization Windows PCs can't deliver.
AMD’s Mantle is not directly affected by this either, but of course, in the long run, this incentivizes gamers to get Nvidia cards instead of AMD cards, possibly making Mantle irrelevant.
Source: Nvidia