AMD probably had to work with The Coalition to add some jank driver hacks to make the game work properly. It's definitely a dev issue.
Pretty sure NVIDIA has had to work with developers and release performance fixes through drivers.
If it would be the dev issue then the drivers wouldn't had such big performance increase for their Fury cards today. I haven't heard of any performance fixes on the NV side.
Why is it so hard to see that AMD's DX12 driver is in a bad shape? It's not only Gears which is (or rather was) having issues but the AotS as well which is AMD's title from top to bottom and it's probably hard for them to say that they haven't seen it in a while.
Oh, I'm all ears.
AMD already informed the press that the game was pushed to launch without their knowledge (and apparently the press didn't know either, as this was a stealth release). The devs failed.
So here's the thing: AMD can inform whoever they want on whatever they want. I don't trust a word out of a mouth of any company on the market and I don't see any reason to make an exclusion for AMD.
On the other hand this is a Nvidia Gameworks title, it means the devs agreed to accept blackbox Nvidia code for HBAO+ and the agreement is that they cannot share the code.
Yeah, it's not. The inclusion of HBAO+ doesn't make a game into "a Gameworks title". HBAO+ is not a "black box", it's a postprocessing shader provided by NV. A dev can see the code hence the agreement on non distribution (why would you even need one if there are no source access?). A dev can edit the code if the license allows it or request it to be edited by NV if there are issues. So basically all of this is wrong - and most of this info is just you transmitting what AMD said - or should I say lied? - earlier.
Now don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean Nvidia necessarily forbade the devs from working with AMD on non-HBAO+ code, but it means the devs contractually worked with Nvidia so it's expected they have good performance out of the gate. They dropped the ball on the AMD side to make sure it launched right, and remember the devs not AMD had to patch the game to fix HBAO+ on GCN 1.2. This was a stealth release, unlike announced titles like The Division, that while Gameworks, obviously perform exceptional on AMD because the Devs clearly have worked within their contractual limits with AMD instead of here where they evidently did quick testing on GCN 1.0 and called it a day.
HBAO+ have no issues running on AMD in DX11. In fact in lots of games it is running better on AMD than on NV. And I know from Ubi devs for example that NV is fixing problems of their software running on AMD cards even though they are mostly because of AMD's own driver issues than the code itself being faulty. But we're not even talking about this so I don't know what HBAO+ has to do with it - the issues with it were fixed in 1.6 release of the game in question, not by AMD's driver.
As for the stealth release - this doesn't mean that AMD's drivers should kill 33% of performance in it. There were a lot of talk on how NV is using game specific optimizations in their DX11 driver and how DX12 will take care of that. So guess what - here's the DX12 game and here's AMD's new driver optimized for the game to provide up to 60% of performance increase in it. There are only two ways to explain it:
1. AMD is doing app specific optimizations in their DX12 driver - precisely the thing which they were saying won't exist in DX12 and is what's bad in DX11.
2. AMD's DX12 driver is in a bad shape at the moment and they fix it on a case by case basis.
I personally think that it's the 2nd option as I don't think that the 1st one is something that AMD's driver team can even pull off at the moment. And you think that it's somehow the devs fault which makes no sense as it's not the devs who are handling the driver - the devs patch fixed HBAO+ issues but not the performance.
You don't have to twist every release into something that fits your predisposed notion of "shit AMD drivers" which is a term that could qualify for your catchphrase. This was an atypical messy release on AMD cards in an Nvidia contractual game, but ultimately it is due to the devs more than brand wars. I'm sure you posted about the "shit Nvidia drivers" in Far Cry Primal, especially since that game isn't sponsored, and did not go into Defense Force in that thread.
Oh wait.
I'm not. If you can go and find where I twist "every release" into "shit AMD drivers" - be my guest, go ahead. But when the driver is obviously the problem - it's the driver. And you don't have to defend AMD in every thread just because you like the company so much.
This game is not "NV contractual" in any way. It's badly optimized for all h/w on the market. This doesn't mean however that this is the sole reason for AMD's issues in it.
FCPrimal is slow on NV's h/w but there are no obvious driver bugs on NV in it. It doesn't stutter and the NV's driver for FCP didn't provide a 60% performance boost in it for 980Ti. So there are no evidence of a bad NV's driver there. There is such evidence in case of GoWUE's performance on AMD.