How to enable Nvidia Phsyx on Ati cards in Batman:AA

[Qbah]

Originally posted by: Nox51
I think because it detailed a way to circumvent the lame lockout placed in the game. Frankly deleting it is pretty fucking piss poor as I think it had some valid discussion in it. Well I can't go back and check on that now can I? Why not just lock it?

The thread is still here, on the first page even Link.

EDIT: Oh wait, that's the PhysX in Batman thread. Don't remember seeing one with AA though...

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Originally posted by: Qbah

Originally posted by: Nox51
I think because it detailed a way to circumvent the lame lockout placed in the game. Frankly deleting it is pretty fucking piss poor as I think it had some valid discussion in it. Well I can't go back and check on that now can I? Why not just lock it?

The thread is still here, on the first page even Link.

EDIT: Oh wait, that's the PhysX thread in Batman. Don't remember seeing one with AA though...

We're talking about the enabling AA, not Physx, correct?

Which both is pretty sad that a bunch of newb coders can get it to run on AMD hardware.

nVidia has been figured out.

Edit: You edited before posting, so here's my edit. Ta da?

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Qbah
Looks similar to what nVidia did to PhysX:

We helped the developer, we gave him money, the game will run at 100% only on our hardware. The features will be artificially blocked so they don't work on other hardware. You want to play it, buy nVidia only.

As sad as it sounds, that's the recent way of "being competitive" for nVidia - and it's actually very anti-competitive. In a normal environment, the hardware should defend itself with pure power and ingenuity and not artificial blocks. But nVidia can't really compete with the new HD58xx cards. The new ATi cards are both faster and have more features. So it's nVidia's way of showing how much "better" they are. Kinda reminds me of their PR BS about a 100$ card being faster than ATi's newest series in PhysX (hardware accelerated physics). True? Sure it is. Total bullshit? Most definitely.

Every respectful gamer should avoid this game not to give the developer and publisher the idea that it's supported. Then again the game sells extremely well (mostly thanks to console numbers, which don't use either PhysX or AA anyway). Also, wasn't Intel doing something similar and got sued for it?

Seriously though what incentive is there for Nvidia to spend money getting AA put into games if it doesn't then enable a product differentiation?

This is one of those cases where people get all emotional about speculating on the motive but they don't really think thru the money and business angle.

Without NV you'd have a game without AA on anyone's hardware. With NV's money (more specifically, with their shareholder's money) they were able to get you AA on their hardware. No harm to AMD, just benefit to NV and NV's customers.

Now lets think about this, logically, for a moment. If for some reason the requirement existed that if AA exists then it must be equally available regardless who paid for its existence then what justification does NV (or AMD) have to their shareholders for wasting their equity developing gaming features that do not enable product differentiation to the competition...meaning why the heck would NV waste their money in the first place if it isn't going to result in them selling more than enough additional GPU products to offset the investment?

Without an incentive to invest in developing features that enable product differentiation do you think the decision makers would just willy-nilly throw around the money and waste their shareholder's equity?

If the choice is "no AA on either hardware, or you must pay for AA and enable it on all hardware" guess where NV's shareholders are expecting NV's decision makers to come down on that decision tree?

The good news is the game is no less functional on your AMD gear than it otherwise would have been, its just got more features if you have NV gear. If you apply some weird set of emotionally constrained/bounded laws of rationality on the situation then the result is that you'd have fewer features, not more, in the game and you'd get AA for no one unless the developer themselves thought it was worth implementing on their own dime. Not exactly what an enthusiast would want...is it?

 

[Forumpanda]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
If the choice is "no AA on either hardware, or you must pay for AA and enable it on all hardware" guess where NV's shareholders are expecting NV's decision makers to come down on that decision tree?

But if we follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion then both AMD and nVidia would have to spend enormous amount of money paying for 'special features' in games just to compete with each other, both bifurcating the PC gamer market and creating a market where it would be impossible for a 3rd party to compete with them as their games would run and look worse even if they managed to create better hardware.

This is obviously not a desirable situation for us as consumers and thus we are justified in making noise about it.

Just because something earns a company money doesn't mean we have to like or endorse it.
Just because men in suits think doing something is only worth it if it earns them cash here and now and don't believe in consumer goodwill, does not mean I have to agree with or stand for what they do.

IMO the purpose of a forum like this is to expose such issue so consumers can make informed about issue such as those and not let either nV, AMD or any other company get away with it unnoticed.

And its not like this issue is: 'nV hardware has these super duper powers so we can do things AMD hardware cannot'.
It is: 'AA works just fine on ATI hardware when the game thinks it is nV hardware'

Also must admit that I am a bit puzzled as to why the topic was deleted, if as I suspect it was due to influence from the makers of BAA or nV then I am disappointed in AT.

 

[Qbah]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: Qbah
Looks similar to what nVidia did to PhysX:

We helped the developer, we gave him money, the game will run at 100% only on our hardware. The features will be artificially blocked so they don't work on other hardware. You want to play it, buy nVidia only.

As sad as it sounds, that's the recent way of "being competitive" for nVidia - and it's actually very anti-competitive. In a normal environment, the hardware should defend itself with pure power and ingenuity and not artificial blocks. But nVidia can't really compete with the new HD58xx cards. The new ATi cards are both faster and have more features. So it's nVidia's way of showing how much "better" they are. Kinda reminds me of their PR BS about a 100$ card being faster than ATi's newest series in PhysX (hardware accelerated physics). True? Sure it is. Total bullshit? Most definitely.

Every respectful gamer should avoid this game not to give the developer and publisher the idea that it's supported. Then again the game sells extremely well (mostly thanks to console numbers, which don't use either PhysX or AA anyway). Also, wasn't Intel doing something similar and got sued for it?

Seriously though what incentive is there for Nvidia to spend money getting AA put into games if it doesn't then enable a product differentiation?

This is one of those cases where people get all emotional about speculating on the motive but they don't really think thru the money and business angle.

Without NV you'd have a game without AA on anyone's hardware. With NV's money (more specifically, with their shareholder's money) they were able to get you AA on their hardware. No harm to AMD, just benefit to NV and NV's customers.

Now lets think about this, logically, for a moment. If for some reason the requirement existed that if AA exists then it must be equally available regardless who paid for its existence then what justification does NV (or AMD) have to their shareholders for wasting their equity developing gaming features that do not enable product differentiation to the competition...meaning why the heck would NV waste their money in the first place if it isn't going to result in them selling more than enough additional GPU products to offset the investment?

Without an incentive to invest in developing features that enable product differentiation do you think the decision makers would just willy-nilly throw around the money and waste their shareholder's equity?

If the choice is "no AA on either hardware, or you must pay for AA and enable it on all hardware" guess where NV's shareholders are expecting NV's decision makers to come down on that decision tree?

The good news is the game is no less functional on your AMD gear than it otherwise would have been, its just got more features if you have NV gear. If you apply some weird set of emotionally constrained/bounded laws of rationality on the situation then the result is that you'd have fewer features, not more, in the game and you'd get AA for no one unless the developer themselves thought it was worth implementing on their own dime. Not exactly what an enthusiast would want...is it?

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the business reason for it. Doesn't mean I have to like or support it.

However, this "feature" in Batman, AA, is not something nVidia specific. Antialiasing is a feature supported by both camps, regardless of the application. It's something that has been available for gamers in most titles since its introduction into gaming way back in 3Dfx days regardless if you're "green or red".

Now if the developer utilized some nVidia specific feature that's not available on ATi hardware, to have AA in this game, more power to them! Then again we have seen AA working in most other UE3 titles regardless if a nVidia or ATi card was running it. It would be more akin to PhysX in this scenario but it wouldn't be seen as foul play - since the AA used in the game would be an nVidia specific AA. Developer didn't have the time/resources to implement AA in their game as it's running on UE3, nVidia came to them saying "we have this thing here that can enable you to have AA in the game, we'll pay you to make use of it" - see? PC gamers would be probably not happy about it either, but at least we would know that this thing was a feature that's supported by nVidia hardware only and not an artificial block.

But we know it's just standard AA in Batman, nothing fancy. Just blocked so that ATi can't run it (even though AA is not an nVidia specific tech or unsupported by ATi). We know it cause people have "fooled Batman" into thinking they have an nVidia card and it runs just fine.

PhysX is similar to ATi's tessellation (with the difference that nobody used ATi's tech in the end). Well, not completely, but it's a vendor-specific feature (tessellation is a hardware feature, PhysX is an API running on nVidia's cards through CUDA). Still, it's something vendor specific. Antialiasing is not in the same category.

 

[Matte979]

Thats it! They are acting like fools.

Nivida will not get any money from me or any person who asks me about which card to get.

Corporate greed at its worst.

 

[Qbah]

Think of it as Intel paying game developers to have games use multi-core support and allow longer draw distance and better visual quality in general only on Intel platforms and whenever the game detects an AMD CPU, it will only run one thread and have medium details at most. Absurd? Yes, Technically possible? Sure.

How is it any different from what nVidia did with AA in Batman? Intel would pay developers to have that, it's their money, they can do it - right?

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Forumpanda
Also must admit that I am a bit puzzled as to why the topic was deleted, if as I suspect it was due to influence from the makers of BAA or nV then I am disappointed in AT.

What topic is that?

Are you talking about the original interracial porn topic that was presumably deleted at the OP's request, or its replacement thread?

Originally posted by: Qbah
Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the business reason for it. Doesn't mean I have to like or support it.

However, this "feature" in Batman, AA, is not something nVidia specific.

And my point is that if we hold-out Nvidia to some standard whereby they must make all their paid-for improvements equally accessible by the competitions hardware then you simply won't have the improvements/features to begin with.

Which would you rather have, no AA for either AMD or NV rigs...or at least AA for NV rigs? Because if you conceptually require the NV paid-for AA to be accessible by AMD hardware then you simply won't see paid-for AA.

Its really quite simple, these guys have to pay their bills and if they are going to do something that creates bills (like paying developers to include features in their games such as AA) then they have to somehow pay for that new bill.

I get that what some people want is this fairyland world where both NV and AMD are non-profit organizations operating out of the goodness of their hearts and that they strive to commoditize their products so that none of us have to rationalize our purchases any further than our bottom line (our wallets)...but you really can't have your cake and eat it to if you want games to have features that are co-paid for by money from the hardware guys but equally accessible by all...in that fantasy world you will get nothing more than whatever the developers wanted to spend for, and in this game that would mean no AA for anyone. Yeah!?

 

[Schmide]

Blue Crystals man Blue Crystals

 

[Keysplayr]

Questions:

Does the Unreal 3 engine natively support AA

If Nvidia spent money to implement AA in the Unreal 3 engine, do they need to ensure that it also works on AMD hardware? Or is this AMD's responsibility?

If Nvidia actually worked with Eidos to add this feature so GeForce products can use AA and QA, are they responsible to ensure this feature is at default, enabled for AMD hardware?

If Nvidia makes the time, effort and expense of implementing a feature with devs in a game, what exactly is this "logic" that I am seeing that Nvidia is required to support AMD products?

IMHO, AMD does need to roll up their sleeves and get busy with devs. They still have GITG program, don't they? Nobody would be mad at them if they actually started "Getting Into the Games".

 

[Schmide]

This is a joke. I think I first enabled AA in a driver back in 1998 on an Intel i740 graphics accelerator. Unless you have some really really screwy matrix math it's not going to screw up.

 

[Qbah]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
And my point is that if we hold-out Nvidia to some standard whereby they must make all their paid-for improvements equally accessible by the competitions hardware then you simply won't have the improvements/features to begin with.

Which would you rather have, no AA for either AMD or NV rigs...or at least AA for NV rigs? Because if you conceptually require the NV paid-for AA to be accessible by AMD hardware then you simply won't see paid-for AA.

Its really quite simple, these guys have to pay their bills and if they are going to do something that creates bills (like paying developers to include features in their games such as AA) then they have to somehow pay for that new bill.

I get that what some people want is this fairyland world where both NV and AMD are non-profit organizations operating out of the goodness of their hearts and that they strive to commoditize their products so that none of us have to rationalize our purchases any further than our bottom line (our wallets)...but you really can't have your cake and eat it to if you want games to have features that are co-paid for by money from the hardware guys but equally accessible by all...in that fantasy world you will get nothing more than whatever the developers wanted to spend for, and in this game that would mean no AA for anyone. Yeah!?

So basically we have been living in this fairytale land for the past what? 15 years? It was somehow possible to have AA running vendor-independent for this whole time and yet somehow it's not possible now? Because nVidia can't compete feature wise, so they want to use money to force their hardware sales? Wow, we were so lucky I guess!

Again, read my example - last time I checked that's like a bribe - "we pay you to have this feature work only for us". Gaming is entertainment - it needs to be right and not foul play. And not mafia-like deals. If that will follow, the one who can bribe more developers will win, the other company will go bankrupt and we'll have a monopoly - obviously we all want that right? Pay a grand for new hardware cause the hardware creator paid another developer to use something that "runs only" on their hardware.

Allowing actions like that should be punishable as it creates an unhealthy atmosphere and harms competition - which in the end harms the consumer, the person looking for entertainment.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: Qbah
Think of it as Intel paying game developers to have games use multi-core support and allow longer draw distance and better visual quality in general only on Intel platforms and whenever the game detects an AMD CPU, it will only run one thread and have medium details at most. Absurd? Yes, Technically possible? Sure.

How is it any different from what nVidia did with AA in Batman? Intel would pay developers to have that, it's their money, they can do it - right?

This is EXACTLY what's going on here. Perfect analogy. Nobody is arguing if Nvidia can do what they are doing, of course they can. What we are discussing is if it's good or not for the end user who likes playing the games. It seems pretty obvious to me.

Why does ATI have to pay to have AA support? Just because Nvidia did? Since when did card makers have to pay to have AA? That seems more like a cover than anything else. ATI and Nvidia don't pay for AA support in pretty much any other game, it is a default feature that almost all developers implement and support for both companies. It seems to me that Nvidia "paid" to have AA just so they could say ATI didn't pay when they didn't get AA. In other words, they paid for ATI to not have AA because if they didn't pay then both would have had AA just like EVERY other game out there.

This isn't something I'd blame exclusively on Nvidia though. Eidos is the same company that was threatening review sites to not publish bad reviews of games until several days after launch so that they don't hurt sales, so I wouldn't put this past them at all.

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: dguy6789
Nobody is arguing if Nvidia can do what they are doing, of course they can.

I'll argue it. Very hard to prove without a paper trail, but if they specifically request a standard feature be excluded from a competitors product for the purpose of sales, I'd call anti-competitive practices. It's one thing to enable a unknown feature for your cards, but to exclude it for another?

Shenanigans

 

[dguy6789]

Thankfully Nvidia isn't a monopoly that we have to support even if we don't like their business practices. There's an excellent alternative to Nvidia available so people who don't support this can let companies know with their wallets. If Nvidia loses sales because of this, they'll stop doing it, of that I'm sure.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Qbah

Originally posted by: Idontcare
And my point is that if we hold-out Nvidia to some standard whereby they must make all their paid-for improvements equally accessible by the competitions hardware then you simply won't have the improvements/features to begin with.

Which would you rather have, no AA for either AMD or NV rigs...or at least AA for NV rigs? Because if you conceptually require the NV paid-for AA to be accessible by AMD hardware then you simply won't see paid-for AA.

Its really quite simple, these guys have to pay their bills and if they are going to do something that creates bills (like paying developers to include features in their games such as AA) then they have to somehow pay for that new bill.

I get that what some people want is this fairyland world where both NV and AMD are non-profit organizations operating out of the goodness of their hearts and that they strive to commoditize their products so that none of us have to rationalize our purchases any further than our bottom line (our wallets)...but you really can't have your cake and eat it to if you want games to have features that are co-paid for by money from the hardware guys but equally accessible by all...in that fantasy world you will get nothing more than whatever the developers wanted to spend for, and in this game that would mean no AA for anyone. Yeah!?

So basically we have been living in this fairytale land for the past what? 15 years? It was somehow possible to have AA running vendor-independent for this whole time and yet somehow it's not possible now? Because nVidia can't compete feature wise, so they want to use money to force their hardware sales? Wow, we were so lucky I guess!

Again, read my example - last time I checked that's like a bribe - "we pay you to have this feature work only for us". Gaming is entertainment - it needs to be right and not foul play. And not mafia-like deals. If that will follow, the one who can bribe more developers will win, the other company will go bankrupt and we'll have a monopoly - obviously we all want that right? Pay a grand for new hardware cause the hardware creator paid another developer to use something that "runs only" on their hardware.

Allowing actions like that should be punishable as it creates an unhealthy atmosphere and harms competition - which in the end harms the consumer, the person looking for entertainment.

Look at these two statements and tell me what you think is good policy for big business.
"We pay you to have this feature only for us."
"We pay you to have this feature for us, and our competition."

If you were paying for it, which would. You pick?

 

[Schmide]

Reminder - you don't have to be a monopoly to be guilty of monopolistic practices. The latter can lead to the being labeled former.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Schmide
Reminder - you don't have to be a monopoly to be guilty of monopolistic practices. The latter can lead to the being labeled former.

Is your definition of monopolistic practice anything like one company offering something that another company doesn't have?
Well, at least show us how you think so.

 

[Wreckage]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
This is clearly the developer at fault then because we know the game?s AA works fine on ATi cards when it?s tricked through the device ID.

No it's clearly and 100% AMDs fault.

Why should AMD get a free lunch? So while NVIDIA did all the ground work to help AA get going with the developer, AMD should just get to sit at home and wait for a check to arrive.

Terrible logic.

 

[Wreckage]

Originally posted by: Schmide
I'll argue it. Very hard to prove without a paper trail, but if they specifically request a standard feature be excluded from a competitors product for the purpose of sales, I'd call anti-competitive practices. It's one thing to enable a unknown feature for your cards, but to exclude it for another?

Shenanigans

Your argument failed. AA is not a "standard feature" of the Unreal Engine.

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: Keysplayr

Originally posted by: Schmide
Reminder - you don't have to be a monopoly to be guilty of monopolistic practices. The latter can lead to the being labeled former.

Is your definition of monopolistic practice anything like one company offering something that another company doesn't have?
Well, at least show us how you think so.

I think it's a pretty standard feature.

No my definition is a payoff such that you exclude a pretty standard feature from a competitor.

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: Wreckage

Originally posted by: Schmide
I'll argue it. Very hard to prove without a paper trail, but if they specifically request a standard feature be excluded from a competitors product for the purpose of sales, I'd call anti-competitive practices. It's one thing to enable a unknown feature for your cards, but to exclude it for another?

Shenanigans

Your argument failed. AA is not a "standard feature" of the Unreal Engine.

Duh - anti-aliasing is a driver specific feature. No engine other than a software renderer would support it. Ha.

It's a freaking flag FFS.

 

[Wreckage]

Originally posted by: Schmide
Duh - anti-aliasing is a driver specific feature. No engine other than a software renderer would support it. Ha.

It's a freaking flag FFS.

Wrong again. It has to be programmed into the game for it to work "in game" otherwise you have to force it globally which is less efficient.

In fact AA does run on Batman by using CCC, it's just slower. So what really have they lost out on?

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: Wreckage

Originally posted by: Schmide
Duh - anti-aliasing is a driver specific feature. No engine other than a software renderer would support it. Ha.

It's a freaking flag FFS.

Wrong again. It has to be programmed into the game for it to work "in game" otherwise you have to force it globally which is less efficient.

In fact AA does run on Batman by using CCC, it's just slower. So what really have they lost out on?

What you have to program in sending a flag (or not sending a flag based on the card) to the directX driver? Again I call shenanigans.

 

[v8envy]

I call double shens. Even drawing triangles takes code. Travel down the slippery slope to hardware makers paying developers per feature (exclusive to hardware, natch) and you won't like what you see.

If you google at all you will find that UE3 does support AA just fine (even with HDR) under DX10. So if someone goes through the trouble of enabling it at all it takes MORE code to lock out the competition. In this case the lock-out code was very simple (device ID check), in the future if this is an issue the features could be DRMed to the point that simple basement hacks will not unlock them.

I remember the bad old days where games would only work well on certain hardware. We're past that with directX and OpenGL. Fragmenting the already niche PC game market with vendor-paid for and enabled features is going to backfire, hard.

Which means if you care at all about PC gaming future you will NOT support this practice by buying Eidos software or the next gen NV hardware. I know I won't.