Matt Burris from 3DGpu today has some neat info on STALKER: Oblivion Lost currently in development at GSC Game World. After an editorial about the 'Nvidia - The way it's meant to be played' marketing campaign, he wrote to GSC because they initially stated that the game was developed on ATI R300 hardware. Read more... Matt received a replay from GSC's Oles V. Shishkovtsov: We use all hardware for development of Stalker, although most are NVIDIA. We will produce a game with the best quality, compatibility, and performance on all supported hardware (T&L or better).
Here are the general things. As a programmer, I need to get access to the latest hardware and talk to it's manufacturers, otherwise we may get way behind the competition. I want to give credit to NVIDIA for agreeing to be our technical partner and render us this kind of assistance (we contacted NVIDIA and ATI for several months, but ATI did not respond). NVIDIA offers me early hardware and very good support. Prior to GeForceFX I worked with Radeon 9700 but I am currently developing the Stalker engine on NV35. Naturally, such close work with NVIDIA engineers allows me to come up with better optimizations and support the new technologies of NVIDIA boards. In Stalker you'll be able to play fine on NVIDIA and ATI hardware--the gameplay and run stability should be the same. On ATI boards Stalker will run fast, but on NVIDIA boards it will run even faster, plus gamers will get a set of unique effects, namely due to close work with the company enginers and support of NVIDIA hardware features. Uh oh, I smell some hot flamage... Source: 3DGpu.com