[WCCF tech] Both Nvidia And AMD Sides of The GameWorks Story, part I...

[tential]

I think he's just saying PC gaming will be too expensive for him to keep up with. He'll just move to cheaper consoles and deal with it.

 

[tential]

That is what sold me to GTX 780 Lightning, and that is what sold me to GTX 980 Ti. For once, Nvidia wasn't charging me MORE just to own them. When a good portion of the metrics were equal, including the price, that ones that weren't equal tipped me in one direction.

I said it some where else, I had no problems when my Radeons were slower, but I was fine because it cost 20-25% less than the 10-15% performance difference. And when the rumors for Fury X were hitting space, I said if it's 90% of GTX Titan and cost less than it (at the time assuming a GTX 980 Ti would be $800) I'd be fine with it too. But, both same price, and one has a little more in the bag. Sorry AMD.

Yup, a 290x is a great deal to me right now... but anything else from AMD? Forget it.

The Batman Arkham Knight thing is kind of lame but you still do get the game eventually so meh.

I expect though that AMD will cut prices on the 300 series lineup soon. Just for launch, they have the prices here to establish that a 390x and a gtx 980 are equal, so that when they're on sale later a 390x will seem like a better "deal".

I hope that's the case for AMD's sake if they plan on pushing any of these cards.

 

[Silverforce11]

I think he's just saying PC gaming will be too expensive for him to keep up with. He'll just move to cheaper consoles and deal with it.

Yup, imagine NV with a complete monopoly, they are more dirty than Intel ever was, and they will push GW middleware into more games. What happens then is our expensive GPUs are running unoptimized turds. That's IF we're on the latest & greatest gen, if we're on older GPUs, tough luck, not only is it unoptimized, its designed to run like donkey on older stuff.

No thanks to wasting thousands of $ on that. Consoles may be exclusive & vendor locked but its dirt cheap. I don't have to justify to myself why my $300 console is running 30-45 fps.. but I sure do have to justify why my barely old $1K GPU (see Titan, then see Titan X after Pascal) is running like that..

 

[tential]

Yup, imagine NV with a complete monopoly, they are more dirty than Intel ever was, and they will push GW middleware into more games. What happens then is our expensive GPUs are running unoptimized turds. That's IF we're on the latest & greatest gen, if we're on older GPUs, tough luck, not only is it unoptimized, its designed to run like donkey on older stuff.

No thanks to wasting thousands of $ on that. Consoles may be exclusive & vendor locked but its dirt cheap. I don't have to justify to myself why my $300 console is running 30-45 fps.. but I sure do have to justify why my barely old $1K GPU (see Titan, then see Titan X after Pascal) is running like that..

If Nvidia is a complete monopoly they are no longer competing against AMD. They are competing against Consoles (AMD is there I guess). If Nvidia did as you suggested with a complete monopoly, they would effectively price a LOT of their customers out of PC gaming and into console gaming (their competitor). Nvidia is a smart company silverforce. THey've PROVEN that over the years. If Nvidia is a complete monopoly, they will rework how they do business to optimally compete against their threats.

Surely you guys work at companies. You adapt as things change... You're not still using typewritters right? You saw computers are were like "Wow, that's a cool thing, I'll use it!" Nvidia will adapt and go "Wow, we don't want to price our customers out of this market and into competing markets, lets not do xyz thing."

Which games is Kepler bombing in again?

 

[railven]

Yup, imagine NV with a complete monopoly, they are more dirty than Intel ever was, and they will push GW middleware into more games. What happens then is our expensive GPUs are running unoptimized turds. That's IF we're on the latest & greatest gen, if we're on older GPUs, tough luck, not only is it unoptimized, its designed to run like donkey on older stuff.

No thanks to wasting thousands of $ on that. Consoles may be exclusive & vendor locked but its dirt cheap. I don't have to justify to myself why my $300 console is running 30-45 fps.. but I sure do have to justify why my barely old $1K GPU (see Titan, then see Titan X after Pascal) is running like that..

Please, don't act as a representative. Have you ever owned a "$1K GPU" such as Titan or Titan X?

Because, from what I've noticed - the people that buy these cards, shed no tears when that fancy new faster card comes out. They actually go out and buy them.

 

[Genx87]

That's actually a bad thing as well. if it can't be turned off and is forced to run on CPU slower than it runs on GPU.

lol

 

[Silverforce11]

Please, don't act as a representative. Have you ever owned a "$1K GPU" such as Titan or Titan X?

Because, from what I've noticed - the people that buy these cards, shed no tears when that fancy new faster card comes out. They actually go out and buy them.

Yes I have, for my science lab workstations, quite a few Titans in fact.

For home use, I have had plenty of 7950, 7970 & R290s for a mining farm and a few for my own gaming use.

I like that my R290s are still improving in performance as time goes by, if I had folk out $ for a 780Ti I would have been very unimpressed with its performance in GW titles.

Also you are quite wrong, there are a LOT of angry Kepler owners on the geforce forums, as is on steam and a lot on Reddit. People who buy NV still value their $ & investment. They aren't as clueless as you think. You may not mind that potentially Pascal's release will make Maxwell 2 suddenly trash, but quite a few Kepler complaint threads on reddit had over 4000 up votes making it to the front page says a lot.

 

[guskline]

I have the best of both worlds; a GTX 980 TI in my 5960x rig and 2 R9-290 Tri-Xs in CF in my 3770k rig!

 

[railven]

Yes I have, for my science lab workstations, quite a few Titans in fact.

And you bought these primarily for gaming?

For home use, I have had plenty of 7950, 7970 & R290s for a mining farm and a few for my own gaming use.

Cost of the ones for gaming only.

I like that my R290s are still improving in performance as time goes by, if I had folk out $ for a 780Ti I would have been very unimpressed with its performance in GW titles.

And you're unimpressed with the performance of your 290s in GW titles too.

Also you are quite wrong, there are a LOT of angry Kepler owners on the geforce forums, as is on steam and a lot on Reddit. People who buy NV still value their $ & investment. They aren't as clueless as you think. You may not mind that potentially Pascal's release will make Maxwell 2 suddenly trash, but quite a few Kepler complaint threads on reddit had over 4000 up votes making it to the front page says a lot.

Been there done that. As an ex angry Kepler user I moved on. You can find my post unhappy with Kepler. "Then why did you buy Maxwell" simple twas better than fury x and ultimately better than consoles.

You can cite them Reddit users all you want. Them being vocal online while Nvidia continues to make bank doesn't do much to help AMD or the "state of pc gaming".

 

[antihelten]

@Dribble
You should count how many AMD GE titles vs GameWorks titles. That statement is ignorant at best.

Just for the fun of it I looked up the metacritic scores of gameworks titles and GE titles, and compared them to each other and the average for all games (from 2008 until today):

Basically the GameWorks titles where determined by looking at the list here and counting all the titles with one or more GameWorks features (usually PhysX, HBAO+, TXAA, HairWorks and CUDA), plus a few games with PhysX that weren't listed (as determined from here, going back to 2008).

Gaming Evolved titles was a fair bit harder to determine, since AMD doesn't really have a neat list of them (as far as I could tell), but it was determined based on this list, this one, and just what I could find with a bit of google searching for Gaming Evolved and various AMD specific technologies (i.e CHS, HDAO+, TressFX, Mantle and stuff like that).

Now I wouldn't read to much into that graph since the numbers are probably not that comparable. GameWorks is a middleware suite, whereas Gaming Evolved, is more of a generalized optimization/features/publishing/PR program. For a lot of the Gaming Evolved titles I really couldn't see if they actually featured any AMD technology/features at all (again AMD are really bad at documenting these kind of things).

 

[SolMiester]

http://www.wired.com/2009/12/ftc-sues-intel-for-anti-competitive-practices/

Those fines wouldn't even come close to what they got from what they've done over the years from the compiler to companies

Sure NOW they make a somewhat better product though that's debatable in the markets AMD is in (under $200 mostly). Won't praise AMDs CPUs and I did go intel, but intel didn't get where they are by making a better product. The PR advantage gained from being in all those systems is huge. What intel managed to do to AMD was massive in my view. Taking revenue thus reducing research on CPUs and GPUs.



Intel cannot be defended on this. This is the reason amd is where they are. Invest billions in better CPUs and reap little from it because of intel.

Nvidia is trying something similar but I think nvidia is doing it out of worry about AMDs presence in consoles and potential dx12 gains.

??, since Conroe (2006?), i think you would struggle to prove that!

 

[Silverforce11]

Been there done that. As an ex angry Kepler user I moved on. You can find my post unhappy with Kepler. "Then why did you buy Maxwell" simple twas better than fury x and ultimately better than consoles.

It doesn't bother you when Pascal's release will cause a rapid tanking of Maxwell in NV sponsored titles? It bothered you with Kepler, but you reward their behavior. I don't understand that mentality.. but then again, I don't upgrade every year so maybe that's why. I like to keep GPUs for ~3 years. Luckily for me the R290s are still very fast as they receive driver updates so I'll probably hang onto these for a few more years (or whenever 14nm is out).

The 2x R290s cost me $1K here, at the time, 780Ti was $800. I would have made a major mistake if I went with a 780Ti.

I just bought 2x ASUS R290X for $430 each for friends who wanted an upgrade. 980s are ~$750-800 in comparison, 970s are ~$499 AUD. I'm betting R290/X will out-perform the 970/980 just like it did to the 780/Ti when DX12 games are out.

 

[SolMiester]

Yes I have, for my science lab workstations, quite a few Titans in fact.

For home use, I have had plenty of 7950, 7970 & R290s for a mining farm and a few for my own gaming use.

I like that my R290s are still improving in performance as time goes by, if I had folk out $ for a 780Ti I would have been very unimpressed with its performance in GW titles.

Also you are quite wrong, there are a LOT of angry Kepler owners on the geforce forums, as is on steam and a lot on Reddit. People who buy NV still value their $ & investment. They aren't as clueless as you think. You may not mind that potentially Pascal's release will make Maxwell 2 suddenly trash, but quite a few Kepler complaint threads on reddit had over 4000 up votes making it to the front page says a lot.

Is that all, what % do you think that is across the world of users with NV?...Im quite sure we could find over 4000 AMD fan pi**ed that they never got DX9 CF working on their 7xxx series cards, or a working CF driver for eyefinity for over 2yrs after release!.

 

[Silverforce11]

Is that all, what % do you think that is across the world of users with NV?...Im quite sure we could find over 4000 AMD fan pi**ed that they never got DX9 CF working on their 7xxx series cards, or a working CF driver for eyefinity for over 2yrs after release!.

Please find an AMD hate post on Reddit that gets that popular. You won't. There's been quite a few GW related and Kepler neutering threads that went famous, just recently.

NV may cope a backfiring if they keep on pushing GW middleware that only barely functions on Maxwell 2 (even with those owners here who admit "No one uses Hairworks because it is insignificant and poorly implemented.")..

 

[railven]

It doesn't bother you when Pascal's release will cause a rapid tanking of Maxwell in NV sponsored titles? It bothered you with Kepler, but you reward their behavior. I don't understand that mentality.. but then again,

It did bother me at the time because I was still on Kepler. But my upgrade window was coming anyways, so the anger subsided rather quickly.

Nvidia and I entered into an agreement. They had something I wanted, I had the money they wanted. If that's what you call someone being rewarded, it seems it went both ways.

I don't upgrade every year so maybe that's why. I like to keep GPUs for ~3 years. Luckily for me the R290s are still very fast as they receive driver updates so I'll probably hang onto these for a few more years (or whenever 14nm is out).

I keep some of my GPUs for a long time. For example, my HD 5870 1GB is still being used by my nephews in that rig I built out of old parts. They Minecraft. My mom is still getting use out of my old HD 4870 (seeing the Win10 issue, I might have to replace it but then again she's still using Win XP and has no issues with it.) I sold my GTX 680 to my friend for $100, and one of my GTX 660 Ti to my Brother in Law for $75, they don't seem to have issues.

Not everyone is "bleeding edge, ULTRA settings or GTFO" when it comes to PC gaming. Which is why PC gaming is the shiznits. I'm Ultra settings or GTFO! So I upgrade frequently. When my GF saw I didn't like the two year alternating I agreed to with her (ie I upgrade this year, she next) she (who doesn't really care much like I do) didn't mind getting my old gear and I upgrading with every cycle (or those that tickle my fancy.)

Not everyone is me, I get that. Not everyone is you, I'm sure you get that. The vast majority of PC gamers have seem to accepted the Greenworks/Nvidia regime. You see it in market share and quarterly reports.

The 2x R290s cost me $1K here, at the time, 780Ti was $800. I would have made a major mistake if I went with a 780Ti.

Yeah, and when I bought my 780 Lightning it cost less than the MSI 290 Gaming 4G. I don't feel I made a mistake.

I just bought 2x ASUS R290X for $430 each for friends who wanted an upgrade. 980s are ~$750-800 in comparison, 970s are ~$499 AUD. I'm betting R290/X will out-perform the 970/980 just like it did to the 780/Ti when DX12 games are out.

It seems to suck down under. I spent $600 USD for two ref 290x + 2x Corsair HG10 A1 water brackets and that included sales tax and a 32GB USB3 stick. And after OCing, in the benchmarks I ran for $60 more when I took it all back (minus the 32 USB3 stick) I got the same performance out of my GTX 980 Ti which came with a $10 gift card, Batman Arkham, and MGS5.

I don't see how AMD would have topped that.

Please find an AMD hate post on Reddit that gets that popular. You won't. There's been quite a few GW related and Kepler neutering threads that went famous, just recently.

NV may cope a backfiring if they keep on pushing GW middleware that only barely functions on Maxwell 2 (even with those owners here who admit "No one uses Hairworks because it is insignificant and poorly implemented.")..

To play devil's advocate, probably because there are less AMD users.

 

[Hitman928]

Just for the fun of it. . .

Nice work, but I think there's a flaw with your data. Gameworks didn't exist in 2008, it wasn't released until 2014 some time, so you'll probably have to rework your data.

 

[Elixer]

Seems pretty clear...

In our investigation we found that across a sample of Tessellation heavy games and benchmarks that the AMD Radeon R9 285 was either ahead of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or at most 13% behind. Seeing as how Tessellation x32 is what’s used for HairWorks we were anticipating a similar 13% delta between the R9 285 and GTX 960.
But what we have found with HairWorks is that the performance cost on the R9 285 is double that of the Nvidia GPUs and it’s nearly three times for the R9 290X. If AMD’s tessellation performance was the real reason behind this huge penalty running HairWorks as Nvidia claims, then we would would’ve seen it reflected in our other tessellation tests but that’s clearly not what we’re seeing.
A 13% delta between the R9 285 and GTX 960 turns into a whopping 206% delta, in both instances running tessellation x32. The main difference is that in the first instance both cards were running a standard piece of code that both companies can optimize while in the second instance the R9 285 is running code developed by Nvidia that AMD cannot even see.

There’s such an absolutely massive delta created by HairWorks that it cannot simply be explained by the innate differences in tessellation performance between AMD’s and Nvidia’s GPU architectures. There’s absolutely no doubt that the AMD hardware itself can run HairWorks far better than what we see today. And it’s so inconceivably bizarre that Nvidia would develop the code, conceal it from AMD and then blame their architecture for performing poorly when running it.

So, obviously, something is going on that can't be easily explained away unless the source code is released, and that won't happen, since nvidia doesn't allow it.

Not sure why there are still arguments about this.

 

[railven]

Please find an AMD hate post on Reddit that gets that popular. You won't. There's been quite a few GW related and Kepler neutering threads that went famous, just recently.

Well this is kind of funny.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/

Seems the AMD Reddit owner came out of a long slumber, kicked everyone out and set the sub to private? Caused all the redditors to migrate to a new subreddit.

Woof!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AdvancedMicroDevices/comments/3cgjat/we_have_moved_tldr_inside/

Would be kind of hard now to challenge your claim since the once home of AMD Reddit is basically gone. But, I shall persist!

 

[Silverforce11]

Seems pretty clear...

So, obviously, something is going on that can't be easily explained away unless the source code is released, and that won't happen, since nvidia doesn't allow it.

Not sure why there are still arguments about this.

Some folks here don't care that NV is being anti-consumer & anti-competitive, it doesn't affect them since they upgrade to NV's latest GPUs anyway.

 

[railven]

Some folks here don't care that NV is being anti-consumer & anti-competitive, it doesn't affect them since they upgrade to NV's latest GPUs anyway.

Get the feeling this is sort of slighted at me since, well I don't care but, I've only had two Nvidia GPUs in the last...like 20 years. And hell, one I bought refurbished so not like Nvidia got money from me on the sale. Haha.

Oh well, when I can't afford it - I'll pick up the pitchfork with you. Until then, I'm a happy gamer

 

[Silverforce11]

Get the feeling this is sort of slighted at me since, well I don't care but, I've only had two Nvidia GPUs in the last...like 20 years. And hell, one I bought refurbished so not like Nvidia got money from me on the sale. Haha.

Oh well, when I can't afford it - I'll pick up the pitchfork with you. Until then, I'm a happy gamer

Not you, at least you're reasonable enough to see the gimpage of Kepler is worthy of being angry about. Others don't care at all, NV is always right... even with unoptimized middleware being anti-competitive, no problems! etc.

 

[2is]

If Nvidia is a complete monopoly they are no longer competing against AMD. They are competing against Consoles (AMD is there I guess). If Nvidia did as you suggested with a complete monopoly, they would effectively price a LOT of their customers out of PC gaming and into console gaming (their competitor). Nvidia is a smart company silverforce. THey've PROVEN that over the years. If Nvidia is a complete monopoly, they will rework how they do business to optimally compete against their threats.

Surely you guys work at companies. You adapt as things change... You're not still using typewritters right? You saw computers are were like "Wow, that's a cool thing, I'll use it!" Nvidia will adapt and go "Wow, we don't want to price our customers out of this market and into competing markets, lets not do xyz thing."

Which games is Kepler bombing in again?

VERY well said. Odd how it was merely glanced over and not responded to. Made too much sense to argue with I suppose.

 

[showb1z]

The high-end doesn't compete against consoles and never will. See Titan.
If AMD didn't compete with Fury, Nvidia would just keep selling it for $1k.

 

[3DVagabond]

Bound to license it and someone actually being able to manufacture it are 2 completely different things. The very much doubtful rumor is AMD secured "premium access" to HBM2 from hynix. Since they are the only manufacturer, NV only get HBM2 if AMD does not use it all, eg. once production gets higher or someone else than hynix actually manufactures it.

I would really be surprised if AMD can take all of the HBM2 production.

 

[Grooveriding]

I wish they would have spent more time on the issues with Gameworks and how problematic so many titles are that use it. I can't think of a game that has used GW that has not released with tons of graphical and performance bugs/issues at launch. Witcher 3 is only using the hairworks feature, which was crushing for performance, but other than that the game worked well enough.

Off the top of my head

Far Cry 4
Watchdogs
AC: Unity
Dying Light
Arkham Knight bolded because the game is so broken they've pulled it from sales

I believe the recent borderlands was also labeled as gameworks, but is only using gpu physx, which happens to still be totally broken in the game even with how long the game has been out.

The AMD/nvidia conflict drama is always more interesting, but I think gameworks games being broken af is more important to gamers because it's actually a negative experience regardless of if you have nvidia or amd in your system. The dead in the water kepler performance is also more significant than the back and forth between them.