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[Forbes] Why 'Watch Dogs' Is Bad News For AMD Users

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SlickR12345

SlickR12345

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...And Potentially The Entire PC Gaming Ecosystem

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...-entire-pc-gaming-ecosystem/?partner=yahootix

Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs is the latest PC title to take advantage of Nvidia’s GameWorks, a robust collection of tools that allow game developers to produce a visual experience which epitomizes Nvidia’s rallying cry: “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played.” Developers license these proprietary Nvidia technologies like TXAA and ShadowWorks to deliver a wide range of realistic graphical enhancements to things like smoke, lighting, and textures. Nvidia engineers typically work closely with the developers on the best execution of their final code.
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“Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40% of the market) to widen the margin in favor of NVIDIA products,” Hallock told me in an email conversation over the weekend. But wait, it stands to reason that AMD would be miffed over a competitor having the edge when it comes to graphical fidelity and features, right? Hallock explains that the core problem is deeper: “Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code—the most desirable form of optimization.”
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What do you guys think of Nvidia's practices and are they killing PC gaming?

Cite articles correctly, per forum rules.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=225737

-- stahlhart
 
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Imho,


Having both AMD and nvidia working with developers creates more awareness for the PC Platform! Don't have any problem with proprietary -- creates innovation and improved gaming experiences, which hopefully creates enough good and awareness so standards may be forged to eventually mature!

You're asking companies not to compete in a competitive landscape being shackled with only standards to offer for their customers! How is this fair to PC gaming, respective companies and the consumer?
 
Well, Johan Andersson already said Gameworks was basically a black box to the developers, putting yet another layer between the developer and the game engine and API.

What is more frightening is that Gameworks is tightly incorporated into UE4. Gladly Unity stole their lunch for the indie segment, EA is in their own thing and Crytek is putting some serious pressure on the leftovers of the market.
 
Nvidia did something similar (cobranding and "co developing") when they released the forgettable FX 5XXX series. nothing major happened.
 
Double edged sword. On the one hand Nvidia has created something that developers want in their titles as it gives them effects easily and faster than having to do it all themselves. On the other its not optimised for AMD cards since it comes from Nvidia and for their usual reasons (we made it you can't see it) AMD ends up having to do a lot of work to optimise the shader programs when they see them late in the dev cycle.

Like everyone I would like to see a more open cooperative development market, but its big business and very few competitors and they clearly are not cooperating with each other right now. I don't like Nvidia's approach to these things, I never will.

I also dislike AMDs tendency to hype and not deliver, one thing you can say about Nvidia is they see these things through and build good technologies that they stand behind and then they make money out of them. AMD could have built a similar library, which they then open source or openly deliver to developers and then it would get Nvidia and AMD optmisations in it. But without a competitor its just the Nvidia solution and not surprisingly its winning hearts and minds even if its hurting AMD card performance.
 
i think that mantle as a joint venture between amd and nvidia would solve a lot of issues when it comes to pc gaming.

its not us versus them its pc's vs everyone else.
 
Also lets not forget these exclusive Nvidia features don't come free either. When you turn on these nvidia features, it eats a huge chunk out of your performance. I remember Arkham City and Origin eating 10-20 FPS when enabling Physx.
 
I have to admit that there's nothing wrong per-se with what they are doing, just leveraging their tech to give them an edge on the competition whenever possible.

Saying this, history have shown us that NV sponsored games more often cripples AMD performance than vice versa. AMD games ever since Deus Ex have always ran very well on NV hardware too, the only exception was Dirt with dx11 global illumination, but NV fixed it after a few months.

I mean look at Shogun & Rome Total War, it actually ran better on NV. Then Tomb Raider, very competitive by both vendors.

AMD sponsored games optimize AMD hardware but it doesn't attempt to cripple the competition. Even Mantle is not a way to lower their competitor performance, only boosting their own. Is it a mistake on their part by not being vicious enough? You be the judge.
 
Nvidia is trying to capture market share, is this different than the norm? They have a hand held, so they want you to be able to play on several platforms.
I don't consider Forbes my best source for Tech news, Nore Toms hardware either.

@OP AMD fan boy! :$
 
@Silverforce11
All those examples and many more Evolved titles ran terribly until NV optimized their driver.

The argument here is that Nvidia is obfuscating its libraries to prevent devs optimizing code for AMD. As opposed to AMD's "Doing the work for everyone else" spirit. Or so they say.

blackened23 said:
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But per AMD Mantle is cool. Yeah okay Mr. Hallock. Whatever you say. LOL.
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Yeah "Doing the work for everyone else", except in cases where they have the edge and when they really have something worth sharing.
 
Yea, first of all, I dont know if nVidia is deliberately crippling performance on AMD cards. It is a fine line between optimizing for your own hardware and "crippling" your competitors. Just denying them access to your code does not in my mind equate to crippling AMD hardware. More akin to that would be deliberately including something that handicapped AMD performance. nVidia may in fact be doing this, I dont know. For instance, if they included some feature that runs extremely poorly on AMD hardware and didnt allow it to be turned off, I would consider that deliberately crippling AMD. If however, like physX usually is, if they include their specific features, but allow AMD to bypass them, I would not consider that crippling AMD.

However, bottom line is, I find it hard to have any sympathy for someone who whines about proprietary competitor's features when their company is heavily promoting an API that will only run on their hardware.
 
Anybody complaining about Gameworks should also be complaining about Mantle. Sure, Mantle might not directly cripple nVidia's performance, but it still takes away time developers could be spending on optimizing DirectX.
 
This article is about GAMEWORKS, a proprietary set of TOOLS that Nvidia developed on there own dime, that gives developers of games a short cut to programming graphical features. This would obviously be optimized for their hardware, as that would be the whole point building optimized tools. This also cuts down on development time for games, as these features do not have to be built from scratch. Nvidia probably spent a good deal of resources to create this product, and if the competitor does not have a similar product, Nvidia is not at fault. Mantle is a API, it is not a tool set. Very different concept, and not comparable technologies. If the developer thought that AMD optimization was more important than cheaper development costs, they would not have used Gameworks, but they did. Not at all on Nvidia for providing a product.
 
Lot of hyperbole around this subject.

BFG10K said:
Anybody complaining about Gameworks should also be complaining about Mantle. Sure, Mantle might not directly cripple nVidia's performance, but it still takes away time developers could be spending on optimizing DirectX.
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If you stretch any harder you may just dislocate your shoulder
 
It's so detrimental that AMD already has a performance driver set for release. Apparently HardOCP has a pre-release version of the Watch Dogs AMD performance driver. But Mr. Hallock the AMD marketer with his spin campaign. Oh boo hoo. Mantle is cool but gameworks, let's whine about that. Yeah, whatever. Marketing spin doing their thing IMO. Massive eyeroll.

But yeah AMD has a performance driver right now. Wait, I thought that these libraries were obscure, that performance drivers were impossible? Mr. Hallock the AMD marketer is either lying so much that he believes his own nonsense, or he's trying to create some ridiculous marketing spin to put AMD in a "good guys" light. Scum marketing doing their thing again. I find the double standard particularly hypocritical.
 
Meh, TressFX on Tomb Raider was exactly the same thing as Gameworks.

That said, these proprietary optimizations that work well on only one vendor do really suck for PC gaming.
 
Fox5 said:
Meh, TressFX on Tomb Raider was exactly the same thing as Gameworks.

That said, these proprietary optimizations that work well on only one vendor do really suck for PC gaming.
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http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/07/t...ing-looked-at-by-nvidia-and-crystal-dynamics/

Nvidia had access to Tomb Raider source code. Some last minute changes by the developer broke their pre-launch optimization work. This had nothing to do with AMD.

Tomb Raider runs just as well on Nvidia cards as it does AMD cards now, and has for a long time. So does TressFX (it's buggy with SLI though).
 
blackened23 said:
It's so detrimental that AMD already has a performance driver set for release. Apparently HardOCP has a pre-release version of the Watch Dogs AMD performance driver. But Mr. Hallock the AMD marketer with his spin campaign. Oh boo hoo. Mantle is cool but gameworks, let's whine about that. Yeah, whatever. Marketing spin doing their thing IMO. Massive eyeroll.

But yeah AMD has a performance driver right now. Wait, I thought that these libraries were obscure, that performance drivers were impossible? Mr. Hallock the AMD marketer is either lying so much that he believes his own nonsense, or he's trying to create some ridiculous marketing spin to put AMD in a "good guys" light. Scum marketing doing their thing again. I find the double standard particularly hypocritical.
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Marketing, what marketing??

Recognise the card?
Notice that alarmingly red contraption in the background.
Not a very subtle fellow, is he LOL

Maybe, just maybe hire few more driver guys instead :hmm:
If not, hell lets just talk ourselves out of it, right?

In the real world, this kind of marketing work is pure defeatism.
I don't see how this guess working about NV motivation behind GameWorks can in any way be good for AMD

Has Nvidia ever mentioned Gaming Evolved, Forward+, TressFX, Mantle, let alone talk in length about competitors IP?
 
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