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

[Keysplayr]

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

I see you have to pick only certain situations and settings for this to happen. Why should we look at only the medium results at certain settings for us to see what you want us to see? Why disregard Firebirds links? Why is he wrong and you right? etc. etc.

 

[n0x1ous]

not saying he is wrong....780 should beat 280x in every scenario

I dont "want" anyone to see anything specifically. I just want to figure out what is going on with Kepler performance. Unlike you, I don't have an agenda and own cards from both sides

 

[Rezist]

Don't see what the issue is, the game performs exactly as it should and no way is AMD going to be to run nVidia's proprietary code that's in the game, if they pay to develop the title it's there's to keep, unless there going to match the money commitment

 

[ElFenix]

Absolutely. What a loss for AMD to have left things to the whim of devs and the uncertainty of using or not using their code, whether open source or not. Its a big gaming title! They should have been banging on CDPRs doors to make this happen. But no, the code/libraries are out there... to be used.. or not. Jeezus, AMD shareholders should be screaming for blood at this moment.

the really weird part of this to me: AMD is in the consoles! any dev doing cross platform work should want to take advantage of every tool AMD provides to make games work better on AMD hardware. that by itself should be incentive enough to approach AMD early in the process.

 

[Rezist]

the really weird part of this to me: AMD is in the consoles! any dev doing cross platform work should want to take advantage of every tool AMD provides to make games work better on AMD hardware. that by itself should be incentive enough to approach AMD early in the process.

The partnerships aren't free and there broke, they probably on the consoles use as much as is realistic but that's between them and Sony/MS no?

 

[ElFenix]

The partnerships aren't free and there broke, they probably on the consoles use as much as is realistic but that's between them and Sony/MS no?

Your use of pronouns is confusing to me.

 

[Headfoot]

The partnerships aren't free and there broke, they probably on the consoles use as much as is realistic but that's between them and Sony/MS no?

I have literally no idea what this means

 

[Keysplayr]

not saying he is wrong....780 should beat 280x in every scenario

I dont "want" anyone to see anything specifically. I just want to figure out what is going on with Kepler performance. Unlike you, I don't have an agenda and own cards from both sides

Oh come on. If you didn't want, you wouldn't have shown that specific set of benchmarks. Kepler just doesn't have the legs that Maxwell is now beginning to stretch. Apparently, GCN had a bit more in them as well.

 

[Grooveriding]

This blogger from Forbes doesn't even understand the topic he's discussing.

Hairworks is crushing everyone anyways. If you're not running 980 SLI for 1080P or TitanX SLI for 1440p and higher, you're not turning Hairworks on and still getting acceptable performance. It costs you about 10-15FPS just with Geralt on the screen and another 5-10FPS if you're on your horse. If you get in a battle with a gryphon or some such it's about 25-30FPS altogether for Geralt and the beast. It's really inefficient, but it looks great on the beasts. This is a game that doesn't feel good under 50FPS as well. So unless the plan is to run medium settings and hairworks on, it's out of reach of most setups.

The irony is that Geralt looks better with CDPR's implementation of hair, but the beasts look incredible with Hairworks on. The game has an option for using Hairworks for only Geralt or for him and all the beasts with fur. It should of added a third selection for just on beasts, but not on Geralt. Geralt is always on screen and always costing you that massive performance hit when it is not adding anything better than what CDPR did themselves.

Unfortunately nvidia users can't reduce their tessellation factor to make it less intensive. You can tweak the .ini file to reduce the amount of MSAA applied to the hair from 8X down to 4X and that will get you about 2-3 FPS back, but that's about it.

As far as Kepler, we've seen nvidia relegate it to being obsolete with Gameworks games starting back with that mess AC: U. Their driver support for legacy architectures is awful and it's by design because the 980 was barely any better than the 780ti at launch and the 970 was slower. Users have been getting the same performance using old nvidia drivers on their 780/780ti in Witcher 3 as they have using the game ready drivers. No optimizations for Kepler detected :whiste: GTX 780 - possible fail(as performance) in The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt?

The big surprise this year was GTA V not going this route when a lot of us expected it. They only added nvidia's PCSS shadows, but also implemented whatever AMD's shadowing tech is as well and the game runs well on either vendor's cards. Rockstar has so much money though the appeal of a little savings at the expense of nvidia sending some engineers to handicap the game is probably not there.

 

[Enigmoid]

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

That whole chart looks weird and shows little scaling on the low end for either camp. 760 better than 680? 270 and 270X are basically identical. Looks like another game patch or driver update is needed.

As far as Kepler, we've seen nvidia relegate it to being obsolete with Gameworks games starting back with that mess AC: U. Their driver support for legacy architectures is awful and it's by design because the 980 was barely any better than the 780ti at launch and the 970 was slower. Users have been getting the same performance using old nvidia drivers on their 780/780ti in Witcher 3 as they have using the game ready drivers. No optimizations for Kepler detected :whiste: GTX 780 - possible fail(as performance) in The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt?

How much have the 970/980 improved with newer drivers?

 

[bryanW1995]

"Nvidia and CD Projekt Red spent two years optimizing HairWorks for The Witcher 3"

They spent two years optimizing and it still tanks performance?
I don't think nV has any obligation to make hairworks perform well on AMD cards. I do think it looks pretty good, but I think the performance hit is too much, even for nV cards.

LOL. Sounds like the new physx.

As a business, AMD needs to make sure their products and codes (open source or not) are being utilized by game devs to the fullest. They cannot just sit on their asses and assume their open source is automatically going to be used. They have to sell it! They have to push game devs to use it. But they didnt. Thats poor management in my book. What a pathetic forumula for any competing hardware maker to use... 'hey, if we make it open source... everyone is going to use it, no ifs, ands or buts about it'! This impacts their business. They can not afford to leave things at the whims of game devs or others they do business with. They have to be pro-active.

p.s. "Seems like nobody here actually understands what open source is."

fixed:

Seems like somebody here doesnt understand what running a successful business involves.

Good stuff there. Nice to see that both companies are up their old ineptitude (amd) and cheese (nv). The more things change, the more they stay the same...

If AMD managers were reasonably intelligent, they would push very, very hard for their open-source content to be adopted as widely as possible. Unfortunately, the company is careening towards bankruptcy and lacks the manpower/skills to recognize what it takes to compete with NV. Will amd go bankrupt? Will whomever buys them have a better idea how to run the company? No telling, but it should be interesting to find out.

If they wanted to sabotage it, they would have obfuscated TressFX source code like what NV does with GameWorks. But nope, they gave every developer full access, no encryption, to the source code, allowing devs or NV to optimize it easily.

Higher ethical standards, maybe its something you wouldn't comprehend, which is why you accuse AMD of sabotaging NV. Wait, is that you nvgpu, Sabotage Evolve accusations again?

No need to resort to personal attacks, you've been around a long time and know that this sort of sniping will come in (from both camps in my experience).

 

[n0x1ous]

Oh come on. If you didn't want, you wouldn't have shown that specific set of benchmarks. Kepler just doesn't have the legs that Maxwell is now beginning to stretch. Apparently, GCN had a bit more in them as well.

YOU asked me for benchmarks to back up my claim. Should I have searched for benchmarks that showed the opposite?!?!?

I guess we will see if maxwell has "legs" when pascal comes out.

 

[bryanW1995]

I thought people were exaggerating about the nVidia slant on those sites so I went and took a look for myself and it's really gotten worse lately. Even 2-3 years ago they weren't so aggressively biased. It's pretty pathetic.

Anandtech is slowing down on video card reviews too. It basically leaves techspot, a couple of the european reviewers (which I dont like to view since I don't speak the language and google translate isn't fantastic) and 1 of the reviewers at HardOCP for unbiased reviews.

I've always felt that W1zzard and HardwareCanuks were unbiased, though I haven't done any video card research in a couple of years since my 7970 is just getting better with age...

But isn't a 290x usually faster than a 970?

Maybe it's resolution dependant.

Certainly it is resolution dependent, but, overall, they look to be about equal: gtx 970 is 3% faster than r290x at 1920x1080 and 3% slower at 2560x1440.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_970_Gaming/27.html

The hard core capitalists argue that
Nvidia should seek their own interests
AMD should seek their own interests

Ideally however, us consumers should seek our own interests and not be captured emotionally by any company. To do otherwise is to tie the noose yourself and jump.

This is not a sports event where you pick a side and support them.

I think that most people here feel that way...at least, most people who aren't on the payroll of the red or green team.

 

[Silverforce11]

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

You guys love TechSpot, right?

Ultra settings

High settings

You do realize they bench with HairWorks on don't you? It's actually quite a good result for AMD despite that, because from other sites with HairWorks on, the crippling is much more severe.

Here is the relevant bench (Ultra -Hairworks), note how much performance improves across the board, particular the min fps on all setups. And yes, Kepler lags behind.

There's also one thing AMD users can do regarding bad HairWorks performance but NV users cannot. We can lower the tessellation factor from 64x to 16x and gain a massive boost in performance without a drop in visual IQ.

http://wccftech.com/amd-announces-w...driver-coming-boost-tessellation-performance/

It's an interesting result don't you agree? AMD users here can benefit with HairWorks without the crippling performance associated with it, while Kepler users just tank in performance and even a 980 suffers drastically. It's about time you guys demanded a Tessellation slider in NV's control panel.

 

[96Firebird]

Quite good for Kepler too, but I heard Nvidia's own GameWorks cripples Kepler cards too!?

 

[Silverforce11]

Quite good for Kepler too, but I heard Nvidia's own GameWorks cripples Kepler cards too!?

Yeah notice its an R290, stomping on a 780 which its about on-par in neutral games. If you've paid attention, in other reviews that disable HairWorks, 780 & Titan is < R280X and that's just not normal in games without NV's influence, where those cards are usually 20% faster and very close to the R290.

So whatever NV is doing with its dev relations program with GameWorks, its got a major negative effect on Kepler. That's the important point that needs to be addressed if Forbes weren't biased. Because NV neutering AMD is expected. NV neutering its older GPUs is not expected.

 

[n0x1ous]

Yeah notice its an R290, stomping on a 780 which its about on-par in neutral games. If you've paid attention, in other reviews that disable HairWorks, 780 & Titan is < R280X and that's just not normal in games without NV's influence, where those cards are usually 20% faster and very close to the R290.

So whatever NV is doing with its dev relations program with GameWorks, its got a major negative effect on Kepler. That's the important point that needs to be addressed if Forbes weren't biased. Because NV neutering AMD is expected. NV neutering its older GPUs is not expected.

Exactly this

 

[boozzer]

There is no decline in performance.

you are the perfect, ideal consumer for any product. by the way, I got this awesome product I want to to sell to you, interested?

Infraction issued for thread crapping.
-- stahlhart

 

[Keysplayr]

you are the perfect, ideal consumer for any product. by the way, I got this awesome product I want to to sell to you, interested?

When did you start selling Nvidia cards?

 

[boozzer]

When did you start selling Nvidia cards?

hahhaa, that was a pretty good come back

but seriously, I got this perfect something I want to sell to you. it is perfect for you! I promise!

 

[Stuka87]

You do realize they bench with HairWorks on don't you? It's actually quite a good result for AMD despite that, because from other sites with HairWorks on, the crippling is much more severe.

Here is the relevant bench (Ultra -Hairworks), note how much performance improves across the board, particular the min fps on all setups. And yes, Kepler lags behind.

There's also one thing AMD users can do regarding bad HairWorks performance but NV users cannot. We can lower the tessellation factor from 64x to 16x and gain a massive boost in performance without a drop in visual IQ.

It's an interesting result don't you agree? AMD users here can benefit with HairWorks without the crippling performance associated with it, while Kepler users just tank in performance and even a 980 suffers drastically. It's about time you guys demanded a Tessellation slider in NV's control panel.

Making this change in the control panel actually lets me run with hair works on and only about a 5fps hit. With it set to default of 64x its like 20fps hit.

 

[soccerballtux]

Quoted for posterity. I sense a vacation on your horizon .

what, you reported it?

 

[Attic]

You do realize they bench with HairWorks on don't you? It's actually quite a good result for AMD despite that, because from other sites with HairWorks on, the crippling is much more severe.

Here is the relevant bench (Ultra -Hairworks), note how much performance improves across the board, particular the min fps on all setups. And yes, Kepler lags behind.

There's also one thing AMD users can do regarding bad HairWorks performance but NV users cannot. We can lower the tessellation factor from 64x to 16x and gain a massive boost in performance without a drop in visual IQ.

http://wccftech.com/amd-announces-w...driver-coming-boost-tessellation-performance/

It's an interesting result don't you agree? AMD users here can benefit with HairWorks without the crippling performance associated with it, while Kepler users just tank in performance and even a 980 suffers drastically. It's about time you guys demanded a Tessellation slider in NV's control panel.

Ok nice, can't wait to try that.

Very impressed with the game performance on the 280x, even though before reading the above I thought Hairworks was 100% off limits.

A bit frustrating to see that Hairworks tessellation is at default 64x with no ingame option to adjust, when 16x tessellation looks nearly identical and offers massive performance increase.

 

[AnandThenMan]

The guy who wrote this article is only saying what everybody is thinking. And when I say "everybody" I mean those that think.

You are essentially saying that anyone who does not agree with you or buy into Nvidia's PR are morons. Well done.

 

[Silverforce11]

Making this change in the control panel actually lets me run with hair works on and only about a 5fps hit. With it set to default of 64x its like 20fps hit.

Yup, AMD's Tessellation settings in the CC is very useful for gamers to customize for performance : IQ, the interesting thing here is that 64x -> 16x yields no difference in visuals but 64x is used by default. Good gamedevs would not do that at all, as they will try their best to optimize features to the max. Reminds me of the Crysis 2 tessellation on flat concrete slabs, wood planks and invisible ocean.