nVidia obfuscating code to sabotage AMD optimisation.

Edge said:
My main concern at the moment is that while AMD keeps their tools open (Mantle, TressFX, etc, all useable by other manufacturers), nVidia has total lockdown over Gameworks. Obviously they want to force people to buy their product, but this is not healthy for the gaming market at all, and if AMD didn't have a lot of income via consoles for the next 8 years, I'd be very worried about a monopoly. Either way, it's shitty practice, and I won't be buying nVidia cards because of it. The G-Sync shit was just the start, clearly.

And let's not forget that Unreal Engine 4 has Gameworks built into it's core. That's not going to be good news.
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Unreal has always had an Nvidia bias to it, never really had any major issues with it in the past and I'm sure devs will work around gameworks somehow. AMD will continue to do well as not everyone will take up gameworks and for all we know this might just be another G-sync goof.

All AMD need to do is to become the best option for open source OS and they'll do just as well, perhaps better.
 
As I have said many times on the forums Nvidia Gameworks is a huge anti-competitive move from Nvidia. This essentially makes Nvidia dictate AMDs performance in Nvidia branded games, without giving AMD the proper tools to improve it.

This is the same situation as AC4, where AMD were screwed performance wise. At least AMD branded games allowed Nvidia to remain competitive as far as performance and driver optimization goes. AC4 still doesn't have an optimized AMD driver or decent CF profiles, good thing amd manages something with Watch Dogs.

Something will need to stop Nvidia from continuing with this frankly wrong and anti-competitive business move. PC gaming is in many ways about choice, of hardware, cost, graphical settings/performance and that is before we go into PC game or hardware modding, If Nvidia continue down this route us as PC gamers will have less options in the future, which is a very bad thing.
 
If this is going the way I think it is I'll need to find myself a new hobby, I can't stand this blatant slap in the face to the consumer. I also can't see the 'gamer' consumer voting with their wallets and not buy into this for the greater good of the gaming industry. As a poster above stated, money talks! :(

This really sucks especially knowing UT4 has gameworks optimisations and how popular that game engine will be.

£3000 mid range video cards incoming ;)
 
Ya read this story a couple days ago. Never will i buy a Nvidia card from now on unless they change their ways. And to think i was about to get buy two cards from them... not anymore!
 
Is this really gonna word? HardOCP did a GPU performance overview of Watchdogs and the AMD R9 290X beat a GTX780Ti in 2 of the 3 comparisons but in all of them there wasnt that big a difference anyway so youre still getting a $500 AMD GPU beating a $650 Nvidia card. If Nvidia is doing something to shut out AMD and rigging games to where their cards perform best, it seems like theyre doing it wrong.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/05/27/watch_dogs_amd_nvidia_gpu_performance_preview/3
 
All I see is Nvidia GPUs costing more and more. Nvidia is doing this so they can justify the price of their GPUs. Price for performance is already pretty terrible with Nvidia, now they need to justify it. If they keep buying out technologies that AMD doesn't have that devs like using that terrible price for performance will be justified by the features. PhysX, is, and will always will be a flop.
 
MacLeod said:
Is this really gonna word? HardOCP did a GPU performance overview of Watchdogs and the AMD R9 290X beat a GTX780Ti in 2 of the 3 comparisons but in all of them there wasnt that big a difference anyway so youre still getting a $500 AMD GPU beating a $650 Nvidia card. If Nvidia is doing something to shut out AMD and rigging games to where their cards perform best, it seems like theyre doing it wrong.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/05/27/watch_dogs_amd_nvidia_gpu_performance_preview/3
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These guys found the same thing:
http://www.techspot.com/review/827-watch-dogs-benchmarks/page3.html

The 290/290X are right up there with the Titan/780/780Ti...
 
KING_OF_SAND said:
PhysX, is, and will always will be a flop.
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I wouldn't call PhysX a flop, it's done a lot in terms of bringing shiny stuff to games, pushing the particle-based kind of after-effects in games as well, and it's used heavily in the new unreal engine.

Don't forget it can run on your CPU pretty well as well!
 
Mysterae said:
If Star Citizen bends to the AMD side, you might see a bit of a red shift.
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Star Citizen is being corted by both companies. Its going to have unique features from both sides. If I remember correctly it'll have PhysX and Mantle support.
That is how all games should be imo.
SuB said:
I wouldn't call PhysX a flop, it's done a lot in terms of bringing shiny stuff to games, pushing the particle-based kind of after-effects in games as well, and it's used heavily in the new unreal engine.

Don't forget it can run on your CPU pretty well as well!
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It was also used in 3 quite a bit as well.
 
SuB said:
Precisely! :)
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It annoyed me no end tbh, I've always wanted Unreal to be completely free of crap like that. To be fair to them its never been mandatory.

For anyone interested, this is what one of the UDK devs had to say about the inclusion of gameworks with Unreal.
I just wanted to clear up a few things!

UE4 does _not_ have Gameworks "built into its core". We do use PhysX at the core of UE4, but that is a cross-platform, CPU-focused, rigid-body and collision engine, and we work closely with NVIDIA to ensure it runs well on all platforms we port to. Currently in UE4 NO PhysX or APEX feature uses the GPU.

I'm very excited about some of the simulations NVIDIA have shown on a GPU, and I'd love to make them standard features in the engine. We have a great relationship with NVIDIA going back many years, and we are talking to them about a way to bring that tech to UE4 in a cross-platform way. We have no plans to implement them until we come up with a solution to that problem though.
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barnsley said:
It annoyed me no end tbh, I've always wanted Unreal to be completely free of crap like that. To be fair to them its never been mandatory.

For anyone interested, this is what one of the UDK devs had to say about the inclusion of gameworks with Unreal.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this snippet of info Barnsley. Yesterday being tarnished (had a great day before reading this thread) by the notion of utterly artificial performance limitations in games [hardware dependent] worried me greatly for the wider industry. Lets see what happens :mellow:
 
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Another reason I don't buy nvidia cards. They are a horrible company. Almost everything they do is anti-competitive, monopoly, proprietary, closed etc.

Really not surprised by this at all. Although that graph looks like bullshit. I play watch dogs at maximum at 1440p at 45 fps with some dips to 30, and yet all I see is people complaining about how laggy and bad it plays on their nvidia cards.
 
Seeking some clarification, I asked if perhaps AMD’s concern was that they’re not allowed to see the game’s source code. Cebenoyan says that a game’s source code isn’t necessary to perform driver optimization. “Thousands of games get released, but we don’t need to look at that source code,” he says. “Most developers don’t give you the source code. You don’t need source code of the game itself to do optimization for those games. AMD’s been saying for awhile that without access to the source code it’s impossible to optimize. That’s crazy.”
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I find this part interesting. AMD never said that it was impossible to optimize, they did squeeze out 25% performance boost which is substantial, although not perfect. But I find it hard to believe that AMD are given free access to suggest changes as they want. The proof is in the performance, not in the words spat at the media.

Also note that "Thousands of games get released" but those aren't all AAA titles that are going to churn out massive profits, are they? Saying 'you don't need to see the source code for most games' is like saying 'We didn't give them access because it's not necessary for most games' (where clearly for an AAA title, this is necessary as it's imperative that they perform well on modern hardware. Clearly nVidia has had this opportunity, and AMD hasn't. nVidia are simply choosing their words carefully, although still rather transparently.

And again, this business with Unreal Engine 4. nVidia want you to believe Gameworks is a core part of UE4. Epic are saying it ships with PhysX, and that the allegations around Gameworks are exaggerated. I'm finding it really hard to side with nVidia on anything these days. It's all so suspicious.
 
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Chewme said:
In case you guys didn't see this yet http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...ut-gameworks-amd-optimization-and-watch-dogs/
IMO it was just a PR stunt from AMD to make Nvidia look bad.
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Lets be fair, Nvidia only allowed developers access to the source code last month. Not exactly much time to optimize Watch Dogs, and no time to optimize any other current GameWorks titles (given they are already released).

Gameworks as it was was exactly as reported, now however with developer access to source code optimization can be made for all sorts of hardware and AMD can actually make driver optimizations. So from now on there should be no issues, provided the devs are willing to work with the source code.
 
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