AMD's marketing mojo, and dev relations

[Elixer]

I don't think there is a face palm big enough to cover AMD's marketing team.
If they haven't been fired, they should be first in line to be canned ASAP.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...de_Games_Ashes_of_the_Singularity.php#tophead

When AMD announced Mantle, a new graphics API set to compete with DirectX 11, we were well placed to demonstrates Mantle’s benefits. Since every CPU core in our engine wanted to talk to the GPU simultaneously, Ashes got a massive performance benefit.

The bump in performance from DirectX 11 to Mantle was so substantial that it caused some marketing headaches for AMD. For example, during the prototype tests on an AMD 390 we saw performance gains of over 60 percent. However, marketing materials would go out that indicated only a 20 percent boost, because there was concern that no one would believe such a massive jump.

For reference, on the shipping version of Ashes of the Singularity, the average frame-rate of an AMD 390 at 2560x1440 with highest settings is 30FPS on DirectX 11 and 53FPS on DirectX 12. That’s an 80 percent boost in performance based on the real-world results of thousands of players submitting their benchmarks.

Seems AMD (& Nvidia & MS for that matter) had direct access to the source for this game.

Because we were going to be the first to use Mantle (and DirectX 12), we needed to make sure that we didn’t end up with arrows in the back due to bugs in the API or driver issues. Thus, the benchmark was born. The idea behind the benchmark was to help identify and track progress of the APIs, the drivers, and of course our own engine progress. As part of this venture, Microsoft, AMD, and NVIDIA were all given direct access via Perforce to our code repository so they could make their own custom builds to try out different optimizations.

It shows that even AMD's partners can give competitors full access to the source, something that the reverse isn't true.

This is the primary reason we need to get away from all these proprietary (aka gameworks) libs that are being used by some devs, it hurts all the gamers that don't own their cards, and is petty.

 

[thesmokingman]

That's a good read. I think everyone involved learned a lot in the process.

 

[Gikaseixas]

For example, during the prototype tests on an AMD 390 we saw performance gains of over 60 percent. However, marketing materials would go out that indicated only a 20 percent boost, because there was concern that no one would believe such a massive jump.

This is for sure a result of failed and unrealistic past projections from the CPU division and backlash they received from doing so. But i understand your point, they should capitalize on what is "proven" to be real and a winner.

 

[Bacon1]

I don't think there is a face palm big enough to cover AMD's marketing team.
If they haven't been fired, they should be first in line to be canned ASAP.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...de_Games_Ashes_of_the_Singularity.php#tophead


Seems AMD (& Nvidia & MS for that matter) had direct access to the source for this game.

It shows that even AMD's partners can give competitors full access to the source, something that the reverse isn't true.

This is the primary reason we need to get away from all these proprietary (aka gameworks) libs that are being used by some devs, it hurts all the gamers that don't own their cards, and is petty.

Good read thanks,

Not sure why you think AMD needs a face palm though, those gains aren't typical and most reviews don't show them, so if anything that just raises expecations and causes more people to go "Ugh DX12 is nothing like promised!!!" that they already do enough of.

We new source code was available to all parties, they posted that almost year ago in August 2015:

http://oxidegames.com/2015/08/16/the-birth-of-a-new-api/

But yeah, Oxide has definately set a high bar for DX12 game engines, hope more people take the time they have to do it right and also add excellent multi-gpu / cross vendor support!

 

[sm625]

Whoever thought it was a good idea to demo Hitman running at 60fps on their shiny new chip and then not release the product even after 5 months.... should be canned.

 

[tential]

Whoever thought it was a good idea to demo Hitman running at 60fps on their shiny new chip and then not release the product even after 5 months.... should be canned.

It wasn't ready for release.
AMD was just drumming up as much hype for their new products as possible because they HAVE to. Otherwise, people wouldn't know about it, and would just get the competition.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I don't blame them for not wanting to say the 60% figure, since that's only when you're running a very fast gpu with a modest cpu.

When nvidia launched the driver with shader cache they reported a few impressive gains on the cpu side, then review sites fired up their overclocked 5960x's, omg it does nothing!

 

[railven]

I dunno. If I had to guess the CPU Division and GPU Division have their own marketing teams.

Reading the CPU sub-section, it seems AMD has no issues going on to make marketing slides with boastful gains only for real world performance not to match up.

If this is true, it seems the GPU side of AMD would rather err on the side of caution.

Regardless of my above thought, AMD's marketing has always been terrible. I'm still trying to figure out who they thought they'd attract/appeal to with The Fixer.

 

[exar333]

AMD and marketing just don't mix well. They either over-hype and under-deliver, or the opposite. They absolutely suck.

 

[renderstate]

It shows that even AMD's partners can give competitors full access to the source, something that the reverse isn't true.

This makes no sense. NVIDIA is not a competitor of Oxide Games and the latter has all the financial interest in making sure their SW runs well on all GPUs out there, which is why they share their source code with IHVs.

 

[renderstate]

I am not sure whether that 60% figure showed how good Mantle was or how bad their DX11 driver was(is?).


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[3DVagabond]

People just like to complain.