No mostly its just advertising (like ATi sponsors valve...), but there maybe a little truth, like although ATI and nVidia both make vga's to do the same thing they has two different architechers.
So because of this some technologies one company uses maybe more supportive to the a game that uses such technoogies.
Games that have sponsered by nVidia uses a logo saying " nVidia - the way it meant to be played" or something, but it dont guarantees its always better when played with a nvidia.
Anyway I see Half life game engine (developed by valve) uses a good way to make the game playable in most pc's without probs. (this is what i think, but dont know this entirely true)
They use high quality textures and less number of polygons (less wires/squares in wiremesh) so when rendering a game more polygons means more perfomance usage, but here they use higher quality textures to give the real 3d looks.
SO all in all what does this meant to you ? you'd think
I think this game engine doesnt require a new machine to played
I think you better set all the overclocked components to default values, and use some vga driver's settings to make it more into performance mode rather than quality (in ATi we use catalyst control center, i cant remember the application to do that in GeForces,)
(if not rivatuner or such apps probably have a way to choose and degrade image quality and upgrade performance no? )
