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

[geoxile]

AMD has been the company with the most updated API support for years. For everything proprietary, there is a non-proprietary version out there. For instance, one of the reasons CUDA is even popular, is because Nvidia themselves destroyed OpenCL support for years.(Which is worse than what Microsoft had done with OpenGL back then.)

Nvidia invests a lot of $$$ on game companies to use their features. Keep in mind, my argument was not about the usage on a proprietary SDK or whatever of the sort. It was about the "hate" being towards those that aren't at fault.

And, AMD has/had tech they marketed and market, and yes, I saw them all. Because, I do follow game tech.


Some developers choose to get some money and use a specific companies tech. This has happened for many years in gaming. The issue I have is that people are blaming, in most cases, AMD, the company that has nothing to do with it.

I'm not blaming AMD, but reality is their open-source efforts haven't been as effective as Nvidia's proprietary ones. People just don't care about it. They want the unique good that offers something the competitors don't. This almost reminds me of the case of teeny bopper liberals who wear expensive clothes and use high-end electronics while saying "down with capitalism!" or something.

Most consumers don't care about ideologies, even if they say they do. AMD's open stance is nice, I like it. TressFX is open? Good. Mantle info was shared with MS and Mantle was given to Khronos to use to create DX12 and Vulkan respectively? Great. But does that matter? What motivated me to buy my HD7950 is the fact that at the time only AMD cards would work with Powerstrip to lock my color profiles to the GPU's LUT so fullscreen games couldn't override them with gamma correction.

Do game devs care? Ubisoft is on the gameworks bandwagon completely. CDPR is jumping on. It sounds like the Project Cars guys are in bed with Nvidia too.

The way I see it, either AMD's open-source, laid back policy is not working at all. If they want to ever break their reputation as the "generic" brand and start fighting Nvidia seriously, they need their own unique proprietary tech that Nvidia hardware can't access.

Even if they continue with this open-source policy they need to be significantly more aggressive. What happened to "Openworks" that R. Huddy talked about? Where's the open-source PhysX rival? Bullet development has been crawling along and AMD has had little to do with it. From the sounds of it, AMD doesn't provide as much support as Nvidia does when implementing libraries.

Most importantly, unless Nvidia is doing something illegal, there's not much that can be done to stop them. I actually respect the fact that AMD has been aggressively campaigning against Gameworks, it's at least more aggressive than they have ever been with PhysX. But I still don't think it'll make a difference.

 

[digitaldurandal]

I disagree. I'm willing to bet most people who followed Witcher 3 has at least seen or heard about Hairworks, even if they don't know exactly what it's called or how to enable it in settings. Likewise for Borderlands 2 and PhysX. What matters is that they see this cool tech and they know that Nvidia has their logo on it.

Use =/= knowledge. Everyone knows what the iPhone is and who sells it and likely what kind of reputation the iPhone has. Doesn't mean they have one or have ever used one.

Show me any data that shows this to be true. Knowing what an iPhone is, is very different than knowing about a feature that works for a few programs on IOS. Do not confuse them, as I stated - people see the brand. They recognize it from splash screens. This is equivalent to knowing who sells an iPhone.

The majority of PC Gamers don't know what resolutions are. They aren't watching special videos on youtube to follow game development. If it did not come on primetime television the average PC gamer did not see it. Did commercials on television advertise hairworks?

 

[destrekor]

I disagree. I'm willing to bet most people who followed Witcher 3 has at least seen or heard about Hairworks, even if they don't know exactly what it's called or how to enable it in settings. Likewise for Borderlands 2 and PhysX. What matters is that they see this cool tech and they know that Nvidia has their logo on it.

Use =/= knowledge. Everyone knows what the iPhone is and who sells it and likely what kind of reputation the iPhone has. Doesn't mean they have one or have ever used one.

Sorry, you really are stretching too much, projecting beliefs that are based on ill-informed statistics.

Many gamers never even touch forums, yet they keep up with hardware and play the latest games. They just enjoy the games and like to upgrade. They may or may not have a strong understanding of the hardware, but they may have little trouble upgrading GPUs from time to time, and getting games installed. As stated, many stick to what a game auto-picks for settings, and are more than satisfied.

Just because there is the advertising principal, that does not mean that everyone is exposed. I find it far too much of a stretch to assume most who are interested in The Witcher 3 have heard about HairWorks. They may have seen a passing comment here or there, but may not do any further research until they land in the settings page and stumble upon a HairWorks setting. They may still not care and never bother to research what it is.

Features that fall under GameWorks ARE intended to boost sales based on advertising exclusive features, but this is not as strong of an effect as many realize. It may influence 10% of buyers, but in no way reflects why Nvidia has a large market share; that is because they've had better general marketing and terrific products for the past few generations, and have made it an easy sell for people who want what is literally the top performing card no matter the price difference with cards that come close. Nvidia has reached sky-high market share due to lackluster competition from the red camp, plain and simple, and it is because of that, and not exclusive features, that have put the industry into the position it is in.

It is an easy sell to developers to include GameWorks when they see the market is largely made up of compatible configurations. If AMD has a strong product for a few generations, that trend may very well reverse.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Why would the developers spend time and money on adding code that only adds better hair physics for AMD cards alone when AMD didnt even approach them?
Nvidia did the right thing, they worked with CD Project from the beginning to make them add hair physics happen in the game. There was probably an exhange of ideas/code and manpower (= money) for coding the game engine with Hairworks.

If Nvidia didnt support them, I think we wouldnt even had hair physics at all in the game.

AMD should be the one to blame here for not using resources to get TressFX in the engine.

 

[digitaldurandal]

Why would the developers spend time and money on adding code that only adds better hair physics for AMD cards alone when AMD didnt even approach them?
Nvidia did the right thing, they worked with CD Project from the beginning to make them add hair physics happen in the game. There was probably an exhange of ideas/code and manpower (= money) for coding the game engine with Hairworks.

If Nvidia didnt support them, I think we wouldnt even had hair physics at all in the game.

AMD should be the one to blame here for not using resources to get TressFX in the engine.

I believe the exchange usually is manpower in exchange for marketing and deals on cd keys for inclusion with cards.

 

[geoxile]

Show me any data that shows this to be true. Knowing what an iPhone is, is very different than knowing about a feature that works for a few programs on IOS. Do not confuse them, as I stated - people see the brand. They recognize it from splash screens. This is equivalent to knowing who sells an iPhone.

The majority of PC Gamers don't know what resolutions are. They aren't watching special videos on youtube to follow game development. If it did not come on primetime television the average PC gamer did not see it. Did commercials on television advertise hairworks?

No data sorry. Likewise, I know you don't have any data either.

What you said is that most PC gamers don't have the horsepower to use hairworks or physx, and they don't have G-sync monitors, etc. You were conflating use with knowledge. Merely pointing out that isn't the case. Don't flip flop.

Hairworks isn't just limited to some "special video" on youtube. If you follow Nvidia on facebook or Twitter it's shown up there long before the controversy (1.8 million people liked Nvidia on FB and over 800k people follow Nvidia on twitter, 566k for Nvidia GeForce). And now hairworks has constantly been in tech "news" because of the fiasco. The fact that you're trying to downplay it's only exposure as some obscure video on youtube that no one has seen is plainly disingenuous.

 

[Jovec]

Why would the developers spend time and money on adding code that only adds better hair physics for AMD cards alone when AMD didnt even approach them?
Nvidia did the right thing, they worked with CD Project from the beginning to make them add hair physics happen in the game. There was probably an exhange of ideas/code and manpower (= money) for coding the game engine with Hairworks.

If Nvidia didnt support them, I think we wouldnt even had hair physics at all in the game.

AMD should be the one to blame here for not using resources to get TressFX in the engine.

You make it sound benevolent. It isn't. A dev taking Nvidia help isn't allowed to accept AMD help, or the conditions are too harsh for AMD to accept. And vice-versa. It's how the game is played. AMD is no better.

 

[MisterLilBig]

AMD should be the one to blame here for not using resources to get TressFX in the engine.

Why? If the developer didn't care to do it, why shouldn't AMD fans blame the developer? Not condoning "blaming" or whining, really. But why blame AMD? AMD has a solution that can be used for free and it's open to be supported by any graphics hardware company.

A developer choosing to use GW is a developer specifically not targeting AMD hardware. (Which I'm not against.)

 

[geoxile]

Sorry, you really are stretching too much, projecting beliefs that are based on ill-informed statistics.

Many gamers never even touch forums, yet they keep up with hardware and play the latest games. They just enjoy the games and like to upgrade. They may or may not have a strong understanding of the hardware, but they may have little trouble upgrading GPUs from time to time, and getting games installed. As stated, many stick to what a game auto-picks for settings, and are more than satisfied.

Just because there is the advertising principal, that does not mean that everyone is exposed. I find it far too much of a stretch to assume most who are interested in The Witcher 3 have heard about HairWorks. They may have seen a passing comment here or there, but may not do any further research until they land in the settings page and stumble upon a HairWorks setting. They may still not care and never bother to research what it is.

Features that fall under GameWorks ARE intended to boost sales based on advertising exclusive features, but this is not as strong of an effect as many realize. It may influence 10% of buyers, but in no way reflects why Nvidia has a large market share; that is because they've had better general marketing and terrific products for the past few generations, and have made it an easy sell for people who want what is literally the top performing card no matter the price difference with cards that come close. Nvidia has reached sky-high market share due to lackluster competition from the red camp, plain and simple, and it is because of that, and not exclusive features, that have put the industry into the position it is in.

It is an easy sell to developers to include GameWorks when they see the market is largely made up of compatible configurations. If AMD has a strong product for a few generations, that trend may very well reverse.

I have no idea what forums has to do with anything. This is honestly getting tiring.

I'll point out that gameworks is a part of Nvidia's consumer product stack. It, along with features like G-sync, Shadowplay, Physx, etc. is part of why Nvidia has "terrific products" and why Nvidia's marketing is so effective, because it has a bunch of things to market.

You cannot say "it's because Nvidia has terrific products and AMD isn't competitive!" without including gameworks and G-sync and Shadowplay and PhysX and so forth.

 

[Cloudfire777]

I believe the exchange usually is manpower in exchange for marketing and deals on cd keys for inclusion with cards.

Well what Nvidia get or didnt get in return I don`t know, but the point is that Nvidia most likely had some of their software team making code to the game devs to include in their game engine. CD Project have already said PC graphics was toned down because it would cost too much to create better graphics in a big open world game like Witcher 3.
I`d assume hair physics falls inline with that as well. Meaning some support is needed or it wont happen.

This smells like the much bigger driver team of Nvidia again showing benefit over AMD`s smaller team. Less resources to reach out to specific projects like this.

You make it sound benevolent. It isn't. A dev taking Nvidia help isn't allowed to accept AMD help, or the conditions are too harsh for AMD to accept. And vice-versa. It's how the game is played.

How do you know they arent allowed to work with AMD if Nvidia was involved? I get the expression they were and didnt include AMD`s TressFX because AMD approached them 2 weeks before the game was done.
I mean, come on.

Why? If the developer didn't care to do it, why shouldn't AMD fans blame the developer? Not condoning "blaming" or whining, really. But why blame AMD? AMD has a solution that can be used for free and it's open to be supported by any graphics hardware company.

A developer choosing to use GW is a developer specifically not targeting AMD hardware. (Which I'm not against.)

Would you spend time and money on making code available for the competitor when there is nothing in it for you? Or do your own thing and hope AMD doesnt follow through and people discover reasons to pick your cards instead of the competitors due to more resources for games and projects like this?

I understand that a common platform would be ideal but lets be real here. Both companies want something as their own to boast and market their cards. Using TressFX which apparantly is open for both (we dont know if its true or not) can be mis-used by AMD as "look at what we brought to the world" and as marketing for their company.

 

[MisterLilBig]

How do you know they arent allowed to work with AMD if Nvidia was involved?

It would be kinda useless tho, if GW is used, the most AMD can do is make sure the game runs.

 

[monstercameron]

Why would the developers spend time and money on adding code that only adds better hair physics for AMD cards alone when AMD didnt even approach them?
Nvidia did the right thing, they worked with CD Project from the beginning to make them add hair physics happen in the game. There was probably an exhange of ideas/code and manpower (= money) for coding the game engine with Hairworks.

If Nvidia didnt support them, I think we wouldnt even had hair physics at all in the game.

AMD should be the one to blame here for not using resources to get TressFX in the engine.

So, for example, amd should pay crytek to make crysis 4 look great, otherwise crytek won't even bother?

These arguments are just so silly, it is the devs prerogative to make an appealing game not the ihv...that kinda sounds like extortion.


"Pony up some dough or else we are gonna make your competitor look better in our title," if that isn't a slippery slope...I don't know what is.

 

[destrekor]

You cannot say "it's because Nvidia has terrific products and AMD isn't competitive!" without including gameworks and G-sync and Shadowplay and PhysX and so forth.

Very few people (in comparison to the larger market) are buying Nvidia products because of those features. The segment of the market that cares about those features is only slightly larger than the size of the triple-monitor market segment, both of which do not make up a significant portion of the market.

So one does not need to point those out, when most people consider a terrific GPU to be one that has strong performance. Those features are bonuses, and what we are arguing is more people use them because it is there, as opposed to seeking out those features. They are hardly selling GPUs for people, except perhaps after they've had Nvidia cards and that convinces them to stick to that brand for those features. This is something like consumer lock-in/brand-loyalty, and not gauge of success for market share, because the market share has not changed due to repeat buyers over successive generations. That's marketshare maintenance, and granted, those features may be aiding in that front.

But I will definitely argue that those features are not encouraging new sales, not in any significant capacity. Much of the market cares about one thing: does that card allow me to play such and such game? And perhaps: how does it perform in benchmarks? Does it win more often than it loses on those benchmarks? Ring it up!

Why we bring forums into the conversation is because if people are not browsing reddit or browsing forums, what are they doing at the computer? They may very well not bother to do much random surfing, and they stick to playing games, perhaps doing some school work or other necessary tasks (documents for work, email, taxes, etc), and perhaps filling time with youtube and ESPN or following information for another interest/hobby. In all that time, they aren't coming across gaming-related ads, they aren't seeing the glorious demonstrations of exclusive features, they aren't being swooned over by how much better a game looks with this feature versus the standard graphics.

You over-represent the size of the market that actively cares about any of this. The majority have discrete graphics because it is inside their stock machine (think the workhorse systems and Alienwares and other gaming-centric pre-built systems), or they dabble in upgrading GPUs to keep up with games, etc. They just do what they do, and play games from time to time, or one or two particular games all the time and only need to care enough about that game (WoW is a terrific example, many players have never played any other game).

So yes, people have been won over due to those features, nobody is arguing that it doesn't happen. It just does not make up a significant contribution to Nvidia's bottom line. It is better at creating brand-loyalty, I'll give you that, and it took much hemming and hawing on my own part to give that up when I switched from SLI 560 Ti's to CFX 290X's a few months ago. Some people just chase the performance crown or best performance for their money, and ultimately don't let the exclusive features become a factor. A fair percentage of the more informed PC gamer crowd also falls into that camp, so the exclusives are not necessarily any better at swaying any portion of the market. Again, I have to ultimately settle on brand-loyalty or lock-in as the shining example of where GPU exclusive features are most effective.

 

[Cloudfire777]

So, for example, amd should pay crytek to make crysis 4 look great, otherwise crytek won't even bother?

These arguments are just so silly, it is the devs prerogative to make an appealing game not the ihv...that kinda sounds like extortion.


"Pony up some dough or else we are gonna make your competitor look better in our title," if that isn't a slippery slope...I don't know what is.

Who said CD Project wanted Hairworks/TressFX/Hair physics? You are assuming they would make it even if nobody approached them.

The devs may not even have said anything to AMD that they worked with Nvidia until AMD found out close to launch and also wanted in.
Nobody knows the story here except we know AMD was very late. Maybe to the point that including TressFX would maybe not even possible without a ton more work with the engine. We dont know

 

[3DVagabond]

Nvidia is between a rock and a hard place with this situation.
There is no false dichotomy between these next two choices.

1) The driver team missed Kepler tanking with Hairworks enabled. [Note: this is one of the hyped premium features]
2) It was a deliberate attempt to make Maxwell look better than every other line, previous Nvidia included.

Remember everyone, corporations have ONE intention. To remove what's in your account to their own. In the process they will offer either products or services that you have to decide if worth the exchange. Don't be a sheep.

While every company is trying to make money that's not an excuse that they can do it at whatever means necessary. People always using this as justification for nVidia is a slap in the face to their customers (or AMD's customers when they do it to them). Nowhere is this an reason to be unscrupolous in your practices and policies.

 

[3DVagabond]

That is fear mongering to think that one needs to run the game or to enjoy the game with a nVidia platform or AMD platform. These are IHV specific or proprietary features that may improve fidelity for one's customer base -- but the game can be enjoyed over-all by a competitor. The idea of only offering features for everyone handicaps a company that desires to innovate or do more for their customers -- if one company desires to invest, innovate, risk and spend more resources based on their architectural and software strengths, and over-all vision, I see no problem over-all by either AMD or nVidia.

What about the tech sites running their benches with it on though? That is where the benefit to nVidia comes from.

 

[3DVagabond]

Not really. Consumers aren't buying NVidia cards for those features. Those features are successful because they happened to be available on the cards sold by the dominant player in the market. If Nvidia bundled a packet of grape jelly with every card, it would instantly become the dominant jelly in the industry, but you couldn't really claim that the consumers have spoken, and they all want grape jelly. Correlation does not imply causation.

What AMD needs to do is increase market share. The formula for that is pretty simple. Sell a better product than the competition for less money. With greater market share comes the ability to have greater influence on the industry. Trying to create proprietary technologies when you are a minority player is a horrendous business decision unless it is a truly revolutionary technology.

As an industry AMD is far more infuential than nVidia. They are in all of the consoles. They developed Mantle and now the whole industry is adopting more efficient API's thanks to it. Freesync is tied to adaptive sync (DP1.2a) which is now an industry standard. HBM memory which everyone is going to be using.

 

[AnandThenMan]

As an industry AMD is far more infuential than nVidia. They are in all of the consoles. They developed Mantle and now the whole industry is adopting more efficient API's thanks to it. Freesync is tied to adaptive sync (DP1.2a) which is now an industry standard. HBM memory which everyone is going to be using.

Largely forgotten is what they did on the CPU side, AMD64 has been more influential and industry changing than anything they've done with GPUs and AMD has done quite a lot for GPU hardware and software. People confuse business success with innovation, Nikola Tesla is a great example of this.

 

[crashtech]

Yeah, while Intel was betting on Itanium to lead the way to 64 bit, AMD was inventing the 64 bit extentions to x86

 

[Trovaricon]

It would be kinda useless tho, if GW is used, the most AMD can do is make sure the game runs.

Now this is a tricky situation. Who is responsible for it to run / run properly (visual & performance)? Graphic APIs are standardly used for two decades. If software developer breaks rules of API used (Nearly every game ships broken) - who should fix it? Driver team of IHV... Because they are the one to blame! (no one cares who f*cked it up)

While every company is trying to make money that's not an excuse that they can do it at whatever means necessary. People always using this as justification for nVidia is a slap in the face to their customers (or AMD's customers when they do it to them). Nowhere is this an reason to be unscrupolous in your practices and policies.

Why not? Was there any face-to-face discussion with Crysis 2 renderer / engine developer responsible for tessellated water "feature" or tessellation use in general? HairWorks 64 tessellation factor? Believe me, that would end up like "Hitler" or now popular "El Risitas" videos only this one would not need to have made up subtitles.

Largely forgotten is what they did on the CPU side, AMD64 has been more influential and industry changing than anything they've done with GPUs and AMD has done quite a lot for GPU hardware and software. People confuse business success with innovation, Nikola Tesla is a great example of this.

Only a very small fraction of human population drives the progress and innovation. If research requires material or monetary supporters, then you can be sure that those supporters have their own reasons - rarely in line with the one they intend to support. Their motivation is most often power - monetary or military.

You can't use hard facts, logic and reason to argue with general public. Unfortunately, those are dominant things you can expect engineer to "fight with" in discussion.
You could probably fit all the individuals over the world who seriously know why is behaviour of particular SW / HW in some scenario as it is in one small pub and let them ramble "their way".
How many people are capable to start debugger (PIX / VS no need for brand specific) and watch how is scene in 3D game being drawn? How many do so and go "fight on the internet" - we all know meme about husband's response to his wife's call to bed.

For the rest of the world applies: Ignorance is bliss.

/my sarcasm meter is running low

 

[desprado]

Sorry mod for harsh comment but need to put in simple words that Professionals knows that AMD is totally wrong but only Red Team cannot accept the facts.

Provide information to back up your accusations. Your comments in no way promote a civil discussion on the issue. -Moderator Subyman

 

[3DVagabond]

Why not? Was there any face-to-face discussion with Crysis 2 renderer / engine developer responsible for tessellated water "feature" or tessellation use in general? HairWorks 64 tessellation factor? Believe me, that would end up like "Hitler" or now popular "El Risitas" videos only this one would not need to have made up subtitles.

Is that a serious question? If so, you must have completely missed the meaning of what you quoted.

We, consumers, individuals sit here and say it's OK because they are only trying to make a buck. That's like excusing someone's infidelity because "they could". Or, "Guys do stuff like that." and it somehow makes it OK? Come on now, think about it.

Trying to make money is not an acceptable reason to do dodgy underhanded things.

 

[Edgy]

I don't see why there's even a debate about this.

Nvidia is more than welcome to innovate and add features for their products like phsx, hairworks, etc.,

If they want to make those features proprietary and pay game devs to use them, that's their right too.

The above is not the problem - the PROBLEM is that they (nvidia & gamedevs) implement those features with either gross negligence or purposefully in a way that negatively affects competitors' products (and even nvidia's older generation products).

This practice must stop and I for one will never purchase another nvidia product nor any games made by gamedevs who take part in such irresponsible behavior.

 

[MisterLilBig]

Now this is a tricky situation. Who is responsible for it to run / run properly (visual & performance)? Graphic APIs are standardly used for two decades. If software developer breaks rules of API used (Nearly every game ships broken) - who should fix it? Driver team of IHV... Because they are the one to blame! (no one cares who f*cked it up)

AMD is not allowed to modify the "black box" that is GameWorks. Which, I repeat again, all AMD can do is make sure the game runs.

Sorry mod for harsh comment but need to put in simple words that Professionals knows that AMD is totally wrong but only Red Team cannot accept the facts.

The fact is that people are blaming AMD for something they can't be involved with.

Nvidia is more than welcome to innovate and add features for their products like phsx, hairworks, etc.,

If they want to make those features proprietary and pay game devs to use them, that's their right too.

Yup.

The above is not the problem - the PROBLEM is that they (nvidia & gamedevs) implement those features with either gross negligence or purposefully in a way that negatively affects competitors' products (and even nvidia's older generation products). This practice must stop and I for one will never purchase another nvidia product nor any games made by gamedevs who take part in such irresponsible behavior.

This has been my stance since the start. I will not spend any money on NV related products.(Which makes me a little sad because of Denver, but, my values matter more.)

 

[Gikaseixas]

Just purchased the game (downloading right now), i couldn't hold on much longer as i love racing simulations, and i'll play it with what i have, that's a 7970 Ghz or a 880M which in this case i'm not even sure how they'll perform.
Fingers crossed