All this talk about IP and trade secrets and what not, while not wrong for nVidia to protect, reminds me of a weird feeling when I watched the last GTC...
JHH introduces Elon Musk onto stage, says Elon was JHH's hero. These two could not be further opposites.
With nVidias current market position, brand power, and resources, opening up key tech to the entire industry would unanimously win the hearts of gamers, consumers, and developers. Ensuring that the most widely adopted techniques are their own design and would run best on their hardware. But right now it's tearing it apart.
If Gameworks became open, AMD would have no choice to cater their efforts to make this system work as well on their stuff. This could destroy AMD as they may not have the resources to react to this kind of shift. Worst case scenario though. Best case, AMD remains competitive and all IHVs further improve.
In the same vein when Elon Musk opened up all the patents for his electric cars for the betterment of the industry.
I see people here now comparing Mantle to Gameworks.... Mantle WAS closed, sure. And back then yeah you could raise hell for it's closed nature when it was being developed. Now though, it's completely open in the form of Vulkan. But it was also distributed to make the closed Metal and DX12.
Now, the comparison is laughable. Gameworks is closed currently, and while it is along with the business it brings, everyone should be up in arms as the harm it's doing is clear. If it ever opens up, it could be a great thing to happen to the industry.
Wow, this guy gets it!
Almost all proprietary tech has been superseded by open standards with time and closed standards usually fail unless it's nearly a 100% monopoly (BluRay). Sooner or later they usually fail. It's why things like the Apple Lightning/Thunderbolt connectors have trouble taking off while USB Type-C will likely soon become the defacto connecting standard. PhysX had so much potential but until it remains closed-source, it's basically dead. Over time PhysX just faded more and more. Today, besides Borderlands and Batman games, almost no one cares about PhysX, and that's despite NV having nearly 80% dGPU market share. Just goes to show how much of a failure GPU-based PhysX really is! Unless NV gives a developer marketing $ to shove PhysX into their game, no one even cares to use it. It's become mostly a marketing gimmick/check-mark point as a promise that "in the future there will be new PhysX" games, but they never come besides the same tired franchisees.
In the past, all next generation graphical features would have some kind of a standard and if something was used inefficiently, the game developer would either throw it out because the trade-off wasn't worth it, or they would optimize the graphical feature to find the optimal balance of Performance vs. IQ.
GameWorks goes against all of that because NV provides proprietary closed source DLLs/SDK that developers can't optimize. As a result, companies like CDPR can't fix the broken 8xMSAA and 64x tessellation NV has coded into HairWorks. It's basically an ON/OFF switch for HairWorks.
For textures, lighting, shadows, draw distance, we normally get a slider/settings that allows us to find a balance. NV's goal is to make $, which means selling newer video cards. They would want nothing more than for a PC gamer to wake up, turn some new graphical feature, be wowed by it, realize their current NV/AMD card runs like a turd, and go out and buy a new card (i.e, Maxwell, Pascal, etc.).
Because NV has full control of all GameWorks source code and the developer can't alter or manage or optimize it for NV/AMD hardware without NV's permission, the developer who agrees to use GW in its game would be unable to fix the performance on Fermi, Kepler or any VLIW/GCN AMD product (or Intel products).
This accomplishes 2 things:
1) Full control by NV to ensure planned obsolescence for its older generation of cards since ONLY NV can improve performance on older generations of cards like Kepler and Fermi in all GameWorks titles. If a developer includes GW source code and it happens to run slower on older gen NV products, they would be unable to fix it without removing the entire feature/turning it off.
2) NV's source code can be coded specifically to harm how fast it can run on AMD/Intel hardware because it's coded highly inefficiently, even at the detriment of NV's older hardware.
The problem is many of NV's GameWorks features are far inferior to open standards in terms of their balance of IQ/Performance.
If NV published all of the Source Code for every graphical effect, then the game developers would be able to find a balance of graphics vs. performance, create a tessellation slider, help Intel/AMD optimize drivers for its products too.
But then why would the developer accept the inclusion of CrippleWorks knowing the source code will mean disastrous performance on AMD/Intel GPUs? Simple -- because NV gives them hardware, software engineers and
marketing funds/co-markets the game -- in other words all kinds of financially quantifiable rewards. If GameWorks was as simple as a game developer e-mailing NV to send them DLLs/SDK, almost all PC games would have GameWorks. That's not how it works. NV gets to choose if they want to work with the game developer or not and obviously all kinds of marketing and revenue sharing/software coding benefits/marketing promotion are discussed.
CDPR doesn't just give a free TW3 game code for all GTX960/GTX970/980/Titan cards. There is a reason they are doing it since NV either paid for the game coupons, thus guaranteeing revenue/profits for each GPU sold to go to CDPR and NV helps to create awareness for TW3 by pushing GeForce Experience Guides and all kinds of marketing associated with GameWorks games. This is "free" publicity for the game developer that normally would cost them a lot of $$$.
Some gamers maintain that if NV/AMD didn't spoon feed developers with new graphical features "pre-made" in house, then all PC games would just become console ports. That's not how PC gaming has evolved in the last 30 years and we are now on what, 8th generation console generation? Even though it might take longer for the gaming industry to adopt an open standard for Fur/Hair, Tessellation, Global Illumination, etc. it's FAR better to have open standards that are optimized, rather than NV HairWorks, Intel WaveWorks and AMD Global Illumination. What kind of a peace-meal game would that be? Disastrous future for PC gaming.
The developers are just as much to blame here as NV is for pushing this business model. The case may be that many software engineers at CDPR hate the idea of GW but someone at the top made a decision that marketing $$$/help from NV is better than nothing. However, they didn't realize the long-term consequences of this.
If CDPR would have otherwise been a straight up console port, so be it. In due time, PC games would evolve as we get next generation game engines (Unreal Engine 4, etc.). Just like in the last 30 years graphics continued to evolve and increase on the PC despite consoles holding PC back, the same would continue. Trying to bride developers by hardware makers creating proprietary source code is akin to Intel shoving its compilers into everything. These are anti-competitive/anti-consumer business practices and shouldn't be supported as long as there are other alternatives. Are there other alternatives that can accomplish similar or better graphical features than GameWorks SDK/DLLs can? Yes. Will it take a bit longer for developers to start adopting them on a wider scale? Sure, but long-term it's for the better for the entire industry. NV is trying to re-invent how PC games are made and their new business/marketing model literally goes against how PC gaming has evolved in the last 30 years.
This idea that all PC games would suddenly become console ports for the next 10 years without NV's GameWorks sounds like NV focus group marketing FUD. In a sea of console ports, a new firm will emerge that will design a next gen game engine; while some other firm will have the guts to push graphics and physics far beyond what PS4 is capable off. It has always happened in every single generation of consoles and during the last 30 years no one needed to be spoon fed closed proprietary GameWorks source code for this to happen.
NV is not a software developer and there is no way it's capable to create next generation graphical effects that benefit the entire gaming industry since it has vested interests in making effects that run the fastest on its own products ONLY. For that reason it is the software developers that need to create next gen gaming graphics, not NV or AMD, unless NV/AMD use open source code that anyone can modify or agree upon an open-standard for everyone.
I think it's terrible that PC gaming is going this route. What's next? Project CARS, Borderlands and Batman franchisees become NV exclusives games? I get the feeling some people hear would actually love that, exclusive NV games made to benefit NV gamers since what's wrong with NV paying off developers to favour them? :whiste:
Facebook
Twitter