Im going to disagree, if its on the special MSAA implemented by DICE to FB2, then yes, i consider it crippling GPUS for no reason. If you've played BF3 with and without 4xMSAA, u will see very little improvement as a lot of aliasing remains. So essentially you enable a feature that tanks performance for little gain. This would fit with your description of the global lighting and shadows in Showdown.
They should have just implemented FXAA better, to not blur textures too much, and done well in Max Payne 3 without a big performance hit.
Even with the "performance killing" MSAA on UQ, GTX680 gets 61 FPS in MOHW though. With Global illumination and contact hard shadows, the HD7970 can't even get 45 fps and all GPUs outside of GCN are a slideshow. Are all NV and AMD GPUs a total slideshow with MSAA in BF3? No. Dirt Showdown ruins performance in all GPUs to the point where those new graphical features are more or less unusable. Also, the game looks far worse than MOHW or BF3 graphically and performs much much worse. That's ridiculous coding.
Sorry, but the advanced lighting, shadows, GI, AO features are a major step towards realism in real time rendering. Just because the effects might seem subtle doesn't mean they suck.
In theory it all sounds nice. I'll wait for another game to implement it where the results are actually noticeable. The way Codemasters has coded it gets a D- from me. It's a 30-50 fps performance hit with those features on and it's barely noticeable. That's programming fail 101. It's just as bad the extreme ocean / barrier tessellation in Crysis 2.
Never said nVidia can't fix Showdown. :\ The direct compute is why it runs better on GCN. Good for GCN, isn't it?
If NV can't fix the Showdown performance, then we can say it runs better because of Direct Compute of GCN. Right now that's just conjecture. NV had horrible performance in Shogun 2 initially and basically doubled it with a driver release. AMD hasn't doubled the performance in BF3 and it's unlikely they'll ever make up the 30% performance gap in what will probably be a very popular shooter in the fall.
Well, we differ on what to call it whether it's crapping all over AMD. It's still an unreleased game in Alpha stages. For some reason that's ultra important and AMD really needs to get it together.
Of course it is. Gaming performance in the most popular games is partly what sells GPUs. Having better performance in SKYRIM, BF3, MOHW is many times more important than having fast performance in an avg. racing game that's already a niche market segment with countless better racers. MOHW is probably going to sell a lot more copies than Dirt Showdown and matters a lot more for GPU recommendation buying decisions than Dirt Showdown is.
Why are you trying so hard to play down and discredit the advanced lighting, etc in this game? Those differences are a big step in the right direction for real time rendering. It's nothing like PhysX. Not in any way shape or form. You're using the term unoptimized and crippling for no reason, because it suites your position, not because there's any proof it's accurate.
1. It's barely noticeable, like PhysX is in many games.
2. It has an astronomical performance hit.
Neither of these are revolutionary or ground breaking, exactly like PhysX in many titles. Also, other game engines have advanced lightning models such Crysis and BF3. This the first game that uses
DirectCompute to allow fully dynamic lighting + contact hardened shadows. It's not the first game with global illumination or advanced lighting model. If there are alternative ways that result in a great lightning model without the insane performance hit (BF3), I find them superior. It's not necessary to incur a 70-80% performance hit when the game doesn't even look better. That's what you call terrible coding when you use some next generation GPU features with terrible optimization and practically no visual gain, just like extreme tessellation of concrete barriers in Crysis 2 was poor coding.
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