[Forbes] AMD Is Wrong About 'The Witcher 3' And Nvidia's HairWorks

[Headfoot]

It's hilarious to see how quickly you diehard Nvidia supporters flip flop. If AMD ever gets their grubby hands into closed source game code which screws Nvidia users (I hope they never do), you people will flood the internet with tears. Then you'll all forget about it. It's kind of how FCAT, frame times, and multi-GPU smoothness no longer matter to you all, when they were at one point some of your strongest weapons in the forum crusades. None of you bring that stuff up anymore, which is so, so strange. Oh well.

It would be funny, in retrospect, if the deluge of posts ever stopped...

 

[stahlhart]

It's hilarious to see how quickly you diehard Nvidia supporters flip flop. If AMD ever gets their grubby hands into closed source game code which screws Nvidia users (I hope they never do), you people will flood the internet with tears. Then you'll all forget about it. It's kind of how FCAT, frame times, and multi-GPU smoothness no longer matter to you all, when they were at one point some of your strongest weapons in the forum crusades. None of you bring that stuff up anymore, which is so, so strange. Oh well.

The flip-flopping occurs in multiple places here; let's not allow confirmation bias to single anyone out. And yes, this is a moderation comment.
-- stahlhart

 

[Vesku]

You sure used the word "given" quite a lot here. Such entitlement. AMD could have even approached Nvidia and worked with them to ensure Gameworks in Witcher 3 or any title works properly or at least better on their hardware. You know this hasn't happened before. Because there isn't any chance that Nvidia would deny AMD the ability to make gameworks games run better on AMD hardware. It would be all over the internet otherwise.
So, not everything is just "given". Some things need to be gone after to make work right or better.

So you are now taking the position it's not CD Projekt Red at the helm when it comes to things like Hairworks? Do either Nvidia or AMD make approaches to each other ever? Just as it would be bad press to deny your competitor the opportunity to try to make your crippling techniques a bit less crippling, although that hasn't stopped JHH from being very publicly protective of the GPU compute side of PhysX, it would also be an excellent opportunity to push out PR pieces along the lines of "Our tech is so amazing competitors come begging for just a glimpse."

What about Nvidia not even optimizing Hairworks for their own cards that were top of the line ~8-9 months ago? Perhaps because those same changes needed for Kepler to run Hairworks at a lower performance hit would also result in decent performance for AMD?

 

[Keysplayr]

So you are now taking the position it's not CD Projekt Red at the helm when it comes to things like Hairworks? Do either Nvidia or AMD make approaches to each other ever? Just as it would be bad press to deny your competitor the opportunity to try to make your crippling techniques a bit less crippling, although that hasn't stopped JHH from being very publicly protective of the GPU compute side of PhysX, it would also be an excellent opportunity to push out PR pieces along the lines of "Our tech is so amazing competitors come begging for just a glimpse."

You need to correct your line of thinking. With you it seems it's either black or white. On or off. Yes or no.
It is very safe to say that cooperation from ALL parties are required to make things work, and a desire to make your customers as happy as possible. As is usually true with a company who wants to succeed.

You call it crippling. I call it Nvidia making better product for THEIR hardware that THEIR customers have purchased, or will purchase seeing how well Nvidia supports THEIR products and dev relations..

And lastly, are there no cross-licensing going on between Nvidia and AMD at all for any kind of IP?

 

[Vesku]

There you go. With you it seems it's either black or white. On or off. Yes or no.
It is very safe to say that cooperation from ALL parties are required to make things work, as is true in all things.

I mainly see one company of the gaming GPU duopoly showing no interest in cooperation. Nvidia could have embraced and extended TressFX easily enough. Will Hairworks be opened up as much as TressFX post Tomb Raider?

 

[Vesku]

It is very safe to say that cooperation from ALL parties are required to make things work, and a desire to make your customers as happy as possible. As is usually true with a company who wants to succeed.

Kepler owners don't seem very pleased at the moment. Guess Nvidia doesn't want to succeed?

 

[iiiankiii]

I agree. AMD needs to stop complaining and get things done. However, GameWorks is still a anti gamer. Nvidia is still involved in some shady crap. It is hard to play fair when Nvidia tries to screw them over every chance they get. Nvidia is anticonsumer.

 

[boozzer]

I agree. AMD needs to stop complaining and get things done. However, GameWorks is still a anti gamer. Nvidia is still involved in some shady crap. It is hard to play fair when Nvidia tries to screw them over every chance they get. Nvidia is anticonsumer.

from my real life experience, playing fair in any competition is stupid if you want to win. simply because no one, no one would play fair in a competition with alot of money involve. the gpu market is alot, alot of money.

really, really stupid in fact.

if amd still wants to play fair, I would go out of my way and call every single one of their board members stupid. a few brownie points on the internet would not earn money for them. since nv started, opened the can of worms, it is only fair for amd to oblige. it is extremely stupid of amd to be always on the defensive.

 

[iiiankiii]

from my real life experience, playing fair in any competition is stupid if you want to win. simply because no one, no one would play fair in a competition with alot of money involve. the gpu market is alot, alot of money.

really, really stupid in fact.

if amd still wants to play fair, I would go out of my way and call every single one of their board members stupid. a few brownie points on the internet would not earn money for them. since nv started, opened the can of worms, it is only fair for amd to oblige. it is extremely stupid of amd to be always on the defensive.

Agreed. Fight fire with fire. But the consumers are the ones that are going to burnt from such tactics. Don't try to speak from a business standpoint. Try to see it from a consumer standpoint. No need to defend the shady practice. Actually standup for us, the gamers?

 

[redzo]

if amd still wants to play fair, I would go out of my way and call every single one of their board members stupid. a few brownie points on the internet would not earn money for them. since nv started, opened the can of worms, it is only fair for amd to oblige. it is extremely stupid of amd to be always on the defensive.

I agree that AMD are definitely on the moral side here, but I also think that this is pure inertia and that they are doing it because they are incompetents compared to nvidia's market branding and efficient penetration. Let's be fair: all corporations are evil. They loose not because their products are worse, but because the competition is better at gameworking/selling their products.

But the consumers are the ones that are going to burnt from such tactics. Don't try to speak from a business standpoint. Try to see it from a consumer standpoint. No need to defend the shady practice. Actually standup for us, the gamers?

We need to get some of that business wisdom, otherwise nothing makes sense. The fact that some consumers are debating this is a good sign, but it may not be enough to change the vision of a corporation living in its own bubble.

 

[thilanliyan]

Because there isn't any chance that Nvidia would deny AMD the ability to make gameworks games run better on AMD hardware.

??
Common sense says that nVidia WOULD deny that opportunity to AMD. Heck in nV's position I wouldn't want my competitor to have better performance in one of my headline features.

Just to be clear, I'm not blaming nVidia for getting Hairworks implemented. That decision rested solely with CDPR whether to include it or not.

 

[Keysplayr]

Kepler owners don't seem very pleased at the moment. Guess Nvidia doesn't want to succeed?

Kepler owners are still gaming just as fine as they were a while ago. Oh and hey, there is a new series out, called Maxwell. Just FYI.

 

[xthetenth]

from my real life experience, playing fair in any competition is stupid if you want to win. simply because no one, no one would play fair in a competition with alot of money involve. the gpu market is alot, alot of money.

really, really stupid in fact.

if amd still wants to play fair, I would go out of my way and call every single one of their board members stupid. a few brownie points on the internet would not earn money for them. since nv started, opened the can of worms, it is only fair for amd to oblige. it is extremely stupid of amd to be always on the defensive.

On the other hand it's pretty stupid to try and kill the ecosystem.

Kepler owners are still gaming just as fine as they were a while ago. Oh and hey, there is a new series out, called Maxwell. Just FYI.

And suddenly your card's bombing in new games!

 

[Keysplayr]

??
Common sense says that nVidia WOULD deny that opportunity to AMD. Heck in nV's position I wouldn't want my competitor to have better performance in one of my headline features.

Just to be clear, I'm not blaming nVidia for getting Hairworks implemented. That decision rested solely with CDPR whether to include it or not.

Common sense says that nVidia WOULD deny? Have you heard this as actually happenend? Well, in order for that to happen, if at all, I think AMD might have to ask first.

 

[Keysplayr]

On the other hand it's pretty stupid to try and kill the ecosystem.



And suddenly your card's bombing in new games!

Bombing would indicate a decline in performance. A loss of performance from what was available before. This isn't happening, so..

 

[n0x1ous]

Bombing would indicate a decline in performance. A loss of performance from what was available before. This isn't happening, so..

So whats the explanation for 780=280x when before 780=290? Its not tesselation because GK110 has better tess than Hawaii and its not a vram issue as witcher 3 is very light there.

We all know where the cards should fall in place in relation to what else is on the market. Its obvious to see how poorly GK110 does in Witcher and Cars compared to everything else

 

[xthetenth]

Bombing would indicate a decline in performance. A loss of performance from what was available before. This isn't happening, so..

Or a decline relative to expected performance, based on pretty much any performance metric you choose.

 

[Azix]

It would have been fine with tressfx. If nvidia is working with them and AMD is, they will be up to date at release or shortly after. Ideal situation

Intel? Intel can start the game on their GPUs?

You all miss somethibg very important regarding the tressfx vs hairworks issue.

Lets first assume cdpr ussed tressfx instead of hairworks. All good, use open source code to apply a particular effect of hair and fur and grass on your game, who wouldnt want that?

Well, after applying it, they have to check the performance of the game with that code being used on the biggest range of hardware withib reason. For AMD, they just have to go to their tech papers regarding the uarch, its functions, and use the debuggers, sdk or other complementary troubleshooting software. This is no problem, since AMD, altough sometimes late, its totally open of exposing their uarch to ghe devs and have all those things I named available for using. Ok, now Intel and Nvidia. Well, here is where they are boned, as neither will supply neither tech papers, debuggers or sdk to the devs regarding their uarchs. If they leave the code untouched, it is highly propable their game will run like crap on Intel and Nvidia hardware when tressfx is activated. And here is when it comes the interesting part: those 2 vendors amass the gross share of igps ans dgpus, respeclty. So the dev knows here that if they plan on using tressfx, because of the closeness of those 2 aibs regarding their uarchs, the performance will bomb as the most used pc gaming hardware will probaly tank when enabling this particular effect. There is no conspiracy from AMD in this (no convenient abuse of compute in tressfx to tank kepler as some uninformed users try to imply).

So what is left for the dev? Risk the game success because of a mayor performance issue regarding the 2 most prominent hardware makers in the pc gaming space, or try another middleware with higher optimizations to the higher parties I named? This is where gameworks comes into play. Gameworks code is as closed as a grocery store on 3AM of a sunday morning, but it is designed to work well with the latest uarch of the most prominent dgpu vendor, this is maxwellv2 from Nvidia. We cant know if wheter there are explicit crippling functions ala ICC or they conveniently abuse certain effects such as tessellation(well, after the tweak it was posted in popular forums to limit tess on AMD card and regain almost all the perf lost from hairworks, this is fairly a strong assumption). Either way, performance sucks balls on kepler, GCN <1.2 and probably all your intel igps (but the latter mostly because of the inherent lack of power as they are all igps), but at least more people are allowed to run the game better as nv is the aib with the higher marketshare. Also this is good for cdpr as they get compensations fornusing gameworks (either gpus or manpower from nv) and can shift their lazy asses to move on solving the rest of the game code till retail.

I think the above is what happened here and what usually happens in the pc gaming space since NV, most notably, decided to strat being secretive about their uarchs. As someone already said in another post, it wont be surprising if AMD is more helping than NV when reaching the devs go optimize for Kepler. Which sounds absurd, as absurd as devs settling for using closed middlewares of companies that are not open about their hardware optimizations. Sad times indeed for pc gaming ahead.

 

[Keysplayr]

Or a decline relative to expected performance, based on pretty much any performance metric you choose.

There is no decline in performance.

 

[Keysplayr]

So whats the explanation for 780=280x when before 780=290? Its not tesselation because GK110 has better tess than Hawaii and its not a vram issue as witcher 3 is very light there.

We all know where the cards should fall in place in relation to what else is on the market. Its obvious to see how poorly GK110 does in Witcher and Cars compared to everything else

First I'll ask, are you exaggerating at all whatsoever. Then I'll ask for a benchmark chart for a reference. I'm sure you'll choose wisely.

 

[xthetenth]

There is no decline in performance.

Unless you compare the performance in new games to the other cards on the market, which is what everybody's been talking about this whole time.

 

[n0x1ous]

First I'll ask, are you exaggerating at all whatsoever. Then I'll ask for a benchmark chart for a reference. I'm sure you'll choose wisely.

Not really no. benchmarks showing this are all over this thread.....

 

[96Firebird]

Guess it depends on where you pull benchmarks from...

You guys love TechSpot, right?

Ultra settings

High settings

 

[smackababy]

I will say this one more time, pay very close attention:

1. TressFX is a FREE and DOCUMENTED library with SAMPLES.

2. The game studios have people called PROGRAMMERS who know how to WORK with CODE.

3. AMD is a business, if it is NOT MAKING MONEY (DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY) off of TressFX IT DOES NOT NEED TO SPEND RESOURCES ON A THIRD PARTY GAME STUDIO WHO HAVE ALREADY DOCUMENTED CODE FOR A FREE LIBRARY.

4. If CDPR's programmers need assistance implementing documented code then they should be sacked for their incompetence and laziness.

Summary:
You are asking AMD to spoonfeed people who have graduated with degrees who can read and write code. CDPR's programmers have TressFX code since it is FREE and DOCUMENTED. DO YOU UNDERSTAND NOW?

Spoken like a true never developed a single thing in their life forum poster!

CDPR's guys don't know an API they've never used. If you think it is as simple as just reading the documentation and change a few calls, you're beyond stupid.

Warning issued for personal attack.
-- stahlhart

 

[n0x1ous]

Guess it depends on where you pull benchmarks from...

You guys love TechSpot, right?

Ultra settings

High settings

Look at the medium results with gameworks off from the same article. 280x = 780