You would be surprised to see how many games especially indie games are using PhysX. Not to mention that PhysX is integrated in Unreal Engine 4.
http://www.giantbomb.com/physx/3015-1923/games/
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AMD vs. Nvidia GameWorks in Witcher 3
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
You would be surprised to see how many games especially indie games are using PhysX. Not to mention that PhysX is integrated in Unreal Engine 4.
http://www.giantbomb.com/physx/3015-1923/games/
I still don't get why Nvidia is "scummy " for keeping their own effects exclusive to their cards .
They spend the resources and manpower developing these effects and keep these effects as leverage over their competitor .
how is that wrong in anyway ?
AMD chooses to release the source of their effects, yes but they are under no obligation to do so .
They spend the resources and manpower developing these effects and keep these effects as leverage over their competitor .
how is that wrong in anyway ?
AMD chooses to release the source of their effects, yes but they are under no obligation to do so .
I think the main problem here is just that AMD's developer relations just suck. They do come out with some interesting ideas now and then, but look at the adoption rate for them- TressFX has what, one game? How many games are going to end up using Mantle? They need to have a focused team like Nvidia promoting the benefits of their cards and getting technology and information to developers in a timely manner. Look at the performance advantage you're starting to see on R9 cards vs Kepler, why wasn't this exposed a while ago?
If NVIDIA can get developers to add features that shine on their cards, I dont see what is stopping AMD from doing it. It does hurt the industry to have competing technologies obviously, but if your product has an advantage over a competitor's and you are not taking advantage of it then you're doing something wrong.
If NVIDIA can get developers to add features that shine on their cards, I dont see what is stopping AMD from doing it. It does hurt the industry to have competing technologies obviously, but if your product has an advantage over a competitor's and you are not taking advantage of it then you're doing something wrong.
nephilimdj
Member
Selective reading I see. I listed games using each hair tech. They'll be tied at 3 each once the new Deus Ex comes out.
Did you even watch the video? Look up the tech that AMD mentioned in it.
Lots of companies have Forward+ rendering implemented in their engines among others. Other things not mentioned are, Async compute, and LiquidVR. These are way more fleshed out than any plans that NVidia have for VR. Mantle, the baseline for DX12, Vulkan and Metal will be changing the entire landscape of gamedev.
I think that both companies have flaws in the way in operate. For instance, AMD does not have as much interaction with consumers as Nvidia, which has a representative on this forum and a bunch of tweak guides. Meanwhile, AMD's site is very corporate-looking, if that makes sense. At the same time, Nvidia does restrict their technologies a lot and is extremely aggressive in the way they handle them.
But what I really don't get is consumers trying to defend a company not sharing their technologies. It doesn't matter if AMD is really doing this for the good of the PC gaming industry or not (and I am sure there are company interests with this as well), but what you, as a consumer, have to win with a technology being restricted to others? This is what is truly baffling to me.
I have said my opinion in other similar posts in this forum: I am all up for more competition. Having open technologies can make the implementations of each company the real differentiator. And to be clear, I don't mean opening every single technology (like the ones behind the drivers), but at least the ones that directly impact the game, so things like hair/fur, physics, illumination and so on.
But what I really don't get is consumers trying to defend a company not sharing their technologies. It doesn't matter if AMD is really doing this for the good of the PC gaming industry or not (and I am sure there are company interests with this as well), but what you, as a consumer, have to win with a technology being restricted to others? This is what is truly baffling to me.
I have said my opinion in other similar posts in this forum: I am all up for more competition. Having open technologies can make the implementations of each company the real differentiator. And to be clear, I don't mean opening every single technology (like the ones behind the drivers), but at least the ones that directly impact the game, so things like hair/fur, physics, illumination and so on.
What NV are doing with GameWorks is no different to what Intel did with their compiler. If the compiler detected the target CPU was an AMD one it would disable certain optimisations even if the CPU was capable of using them. Intel got into a lot of trouble over that because of their monopoly in the x86 CPU segment. NV do not have a monopoly in the dGPU segment so they can take more anti-competitive actions and get away with it legally.
The fact is the GameWorks code for these features is a black box and the devs cannot modify that code nor can they give access other IHVs access to that code for optimsation purposes. NV even admit as much.
This is something NV have been doing for a long long time. Remember in Crysis 2 where there were insane levels of tessellation on flat surfaces just because it hurt AMD performance more than NV performance.
Ophiuchus
Member
Nvidia is a big company and they hold nearly 70% of market share.They have huge R&D investments compared to AMD but still I think we should give more credit to AMD for their creativity.
Some technologies you named are extensions of the Physx engine .I am really not that into
such technology , therefore I don't want to bash everything that Nvidia tries to achieve.It is just ATI is more innovative in my opinion.The vision behind their technology always intrigued me.The ideas and technologies ( Eyefinity, Mantle and now Vulkan) that they brought were very bright but maybe the implementation was rather poorer.
NeOak
Member
Consoles can barely hit 30 fps for Witcher 3, imagine adding TressFX lol.
We are not speaking from consumer point of view, but from business point of view. Both are making for-profit business decisions, and AMD made the poorer one it seems.
As for technology being restricted by the inventor, that's a long scholarly debate. On one side it can be argued entities are entitled to reap the fruits of the research labor else there is less incentive to innovate at own cost, and vice versa.
jfoul
Member
Yeah, good point.
General Lee
Member
Ah, so it was "too late". I guess we just have to take their word on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if CDPR just decided they didn't want to piss on Nvidia's shoes and ruin their partnership. Of course it could also be that this offer by AMD was nothing but pr and they knew it wouldn't happen.
That's not the definition of proprietary. By not giving open access to the source makes it proprietary. It's a black box AMD can do nothing about, even if Nvidia hasn't locked them out of enabling it outside Nvidia cards.
abracadaver
Member
Is AMD's 15.5 driver out yet?
Katzenjammer
Member
I was about to write up something like this myself, excellent post. For my next GPU I'll probably go AMD. I'm pretty tired of nvidias anti-consumer practices.
Everything directly impacts a game down to the GPU architecture. I can promise you AMD wouldn't (and doesn't) open source their GPU architectures despite the fact a whole lot of good could come from it for consumers.
But can you agree that, from a consumer point of view, opening technologies would be beneficial? Companies are entitled to do anything they want, as long as it is legal. Publishers can make games cost $100 (DLCs or collector's editions not included) if they wanted to, for example, but at least most of us would never agree to that. The idea that sometimes TressFX works better on Nvidia GPUs just shows that implementation can be the differential here.
Of course. What I meant was things more visible to consumers, like the examples I mentioned.
This I agree with. AMD is not a charity. We can't reasonably condemn NVidia because of their business tactics, which are top notch. If they can convince developers to use their tech their way, that's ... business.
The issue I have, is that AMD is not promoting themselves and their offerings as much, especially to the public eye. Most devs are probably locked way behind NDAs. AMD are also not leveraging all they can for promotions and public image.
AMD's biggest failing is their marketing. If they want to wage war on Open vs. Blackbox, then they have to prove to everyone in a consistent, thorough and quality manner. If this video in the OP is all they can muster ... they have to try harder... to promote themselves and sway public opinion.
Sword Of Doom
Member
Nivea does not have a clause forbidding developers from using AMD tech and I don't mind if Kepler GPU's can't run Gameworks as efficiently as the newer cards. What bothers me though is the poor performance of Kepler GPUs with Gameworks off. That to me is troubling
Unknown Soldier
Member
True competition occurs when two companies compete with their best efforts to win. If you are telling one company they have to fight with one hand behind their back to let their competitor catch up, that's not competition.
From a business standpoint, what Nvidia is doing makes perfect sense. And furthermore, as a consumer, I see one product with all this extra stuff and one which lacks it, why would I ever buy the product with less stuff? As a consumer I should be acting in my rational self interest, and right now Nvidia has north of 70% market share in discrete GPUs and the developers develop games for Nvidia hardware using Nvidia technologies. I'm assuming video cards aren't a religion and correct me if I'm wrong and they are, but as a rational consumer I would pick Nvidia and many of the proprietary technologies they have would be a good reason why. Openness is only an ideal when you're Linux, and guess what, Linux is free. Video cards aren't free, so there has to be a reason to buy one brand over another. Nvidia's proprietary technologies are one attempt to give consumers reasons to buy their brand.
I don't need to defend Nvidia, because what they are doing is what any business would do to compete. If you feel like you aren't profiting from this even though as a consumer you benefit directly from things like PhysX, TXAA, HBAO+, GameWorks, etc. which make games better well guess what, Nvidia is a publicly traded company and you can buy their stock and directly profit when they make money. Their stock is doing well too, in the past 3 years it's nearly doubled in value.
Eh, look at Bloodborne. It's got something like that
If you need to be passive-aggressive in your response, maybe it's better not to waste your time and do something you would actually enjoy.
I never said the current scenario is not interesting for Nvidia customers, because obviously it is! What I said was that we, as PC players, have absolutely nothing to lose from open technologies, because everyone will have the right to benefit from them. And then, as for the business side of the story, previous posts mentioned that sometimes TressFX works better in Nvidia GPUs. So implementations of these technologies by the teams in each company would be the differential, as well as how robust the drivers and their options are.
I think by stating that they didn't approach CDPR about TressFX until after it was known that HairWorks was causing a large drop in performance is a pretty good hint that is was late into development.
If it was early in development, why did decide to approach CDPR but not other developers?
General Lee
Member
Yes, that's the short-term viewpoint. But if everyone thinks short-term, it'll mean there's only going to be one "choice" going forward, and they'll be able to dictate what you pay for it. I've used a 2500K for years and there's nothing better to buy since there's no competition in the high end. I don't want that on the GPU side too. That's why no one should be praising Nvidia for creating anticompetitive lock-in features.
Yeah, the statement pretty much comes off as saying "Well we knew that W3 was going to use our competitor's hair technology since at least 2013 but we didn't care about offering them our technology until two months ago"
Relevant quote from Ars:
nvidia are actively engaged in anti competitive conduct. Gameworks and all branching technologies run like hot garbage on AMD hardware... or not at all. This is being done intentionally from within nvidia and there is nothing that AMD or game developers can do about it.
Do you think the physx Witcher 3 uses runs evenly across all 6 cpu cores on PS4? No way in hell. Is it being offloaded to GPU compute using GCN cores? No way in hell. This is why a dual core Intel and low tier GeForce card can produce comparable results.
Everyone loses here.
When you see a 'The way it's meant to be played' logo you know AMD has been shut out of the development process and game ready drivers are weeks away.
It's a game to nvidia and they're certainly playing everyone.
Do you think the physx Witcher 3 uses runs evenly across all 6 cpu cores on PS4? No way in hell. Is it being offloaded to GPU compute using GCN cores? No way in hell. This is why a dual core Intel and low tier GeForce card can produce comparable results.
Everyone loses here.
When you see a 'The way it's meant to be played' logo you know AMD has been shut out of the development process and game ready drivers are weeks away.
It's a game to nvidia and they're certainly playing everyone.
Saintruski
Unconfirmed Member
don't feel bad for AMD at all. they are lazy liars that got caught being lazy now are making up excuses truth is they had opportunities to add their techniques earlier but never did and then asked TWO MONTHS before launch....yeah no your to late....
THEN there's project cars and I quote
"We've provided AMD with 20 keys for game testing as they work on the driver side. But you only have to look at the lesser hardware in the consoles to see how optimized we are on AMD based chips.
We're reaching out to AMD with all of our efforts. We've provided them 20 keys as I say. They were invited to work with us for years, looking through company mails the last I can see they (AMD) talked to us was October of last year.
Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny. They have though been very forthcoming with support and co-marketing work at their instigation. We've had emails back and forth with them yesterday also. I reiterate that this is mainly a driver issue but we'll obviously do anything we can from our side."
It's not Nvidias fault that AMD had lousy developer relations, are lazy and late. truth hurts but blame game is a way to make noise to cover the real story....
by the way AMD drivers do still suck yea they are stable but the fact that they say they need Nvidias source code to develop drivers tells me that they suck at making drivers lol.
THEN there's project cars and I quote
"We've provided AMD with 20 keys for game testing as they work on the driver side. But you only have to look at the lesser hardware in the consoles to see how optimized we are on AMD based chips.
We're reaching out to AMD with all of our efforts. We've provided them 20 keys as I say. They were invited to work with us for years, looking through company mails the last I can see they (AMD) talked to us was October of last year.
Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny. They have though been very forthcoming with support and co-marketing work at their instigation. We've had emails back and forth with them yesterday also. I reiterate that this is mainly a driver issue but we'll obviously do anything we can from our side."
It's not Nvidias fault that AMD had lousy developer relations, are lazy and late. truth hurts but blame game is a way to make noise to cover the real story....
by the way AMD drivers do still suck yea they are stable but the fact that they say they need Nvidias source code to develop drivers tells me that they suck at making drivers lol.
DeFiBkIlLeR
Banned
It's all a symptom of only having two companies in competition with each other.
The PC graphics card market desperately needs a viable third, even fourth alternative, we have multiple companies supplying every other component that goes into the making of a PC, except GPU's & CPU's.
..guess which two components have been moribund for years in terms of performance improvement, with only small incremental increases in performance when their used to be double digit performance increases every new generational release.
What used to take 12mths in terms of performance increase now takes 24-36mths to appear.
The PC graphics card market desperately needs a viable third, even fourth alternative, we have multiple companies supplying every other component that goes into the making of a PC, except GPU's & CPU's.
..guess which two components have been moribund for years in terms of performance improvement, with only small incremental increases in performance when their used to be double digit performance increases every new generational release.
What used to take 12mths in terms of performance increase now takes 24-36mths to appear.
I won't pretend that proprietary tech is the ideal solution for the consumer but the market can support proprietary and there still have plenty of competition. If AMD ends up falling far behind Nvidia it will be at the fault of no one except AMDs.
There has been and will continue to be plenty of opportunities for AMD to push their tech. Not every game uses Gameworks and Nvidia doesn't have deals with every publisher/developer. For whatever reason, beyond first introducing their tech it seems AMD doesn't want anything to do with developer relations and marketing.
There has been and will continue to be plenty of opportunities for AMD to push their tech. Not every game uses Gameworks and Nvidia doesn't have deals with every publisher/developer. For whatever reason, beyond first introducing their tech it seems AMD doesn't want anything to do with developer relations and marketing.
AMDs' laziness in their software stack has finally caught up with them. Two major game releases in such a short time has revealed just how 'hands off' they are running their dev relations.
Nothing but whining and blaming the competition. As far as I see it, gameworks is for Nvidia GPUs only, the fact that it can run on AMD cards is irrelevant. If AMD want better performance they need to come up with a comparable library that devs are willing to use instead. Nvidia owes them and their customers nothing.
Anyway all this is moot, the market has already decided and buys NV in overwhelming numbers. Which is probably why gameworks is so popular, might as well give the majority the eye candy.
Nothing but whining and blaming the competition. As far as I see it, gameworks is for Nvidia GPUs only, the fact that it can run on AMD cards is irrelevant. If AMD want better performance they need to come up with a comparable library that devs are willing to use instead. Nvidia owes them and their customers nothing.
Anyway all this is moot, the market has already decided and buys NV in overwhelming numbers. Which is probably why gameworks is so popular, might as well give the majority the eye candy.
I'm not agreeing to anything.
This is a big scholarly debate which is out of our respective depths: whether consumers lose in long run since corporations have less incentive for self-funded innovation.
Sticky&Sweet
Banned
If anything, to me, this just demonstrates Nvidia's superiority.
I don't know, the whole PCars incident smells like AMD playing the victim. PCars has no gameworks features and AMD is blaming SMS as well as Nvidia. I don't like it. Its like they are looking for underdog sympathy against big bad Nvidia while having a history of shit driver support.
Might be inclined to believe AMD if they weren't so quick to blame everyone but themselves. Nvidia's no saint, but I think their evilness has been embellished.
Might be inclined to believe AMD if they weren't so quick to blame everyone but themselves. Nvidia's no saint, but I think their evilness has been embellished.
Now that was pure scummy. And the pathetic thing is some people here defended that.
Unity3d core physic engine is also using PhysX
Unreal Engine 4 also has an very active GameWorks fork with great feedback from Nvidia programmers helping game developers with GameWorks on UE4.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?53735-NVIDIA-GameWorks-Integration
This was tech demo was released by a regular user just testing out HairWorks a few days after the UE4 HairWorks build got released UE4 HairWorks
I also want to point out I haven't seen any AMD presence in UE4 offering to help integrate their technology like TressFx. At best some users were grumbling about doing it themselves if AMD doesn't do it but that amounted to nothing.
If AMD starts complaining about GameWorks popping up like crazy on UE4 or Unity3d indie titles they got no one to blame but themselves.
The bolded is wrong. Game Developers should be the primary target for blame, well publishers more so actually. They're the ones who choose what goes into their games. Whether compensation is involved or superior product, is another matter.
Saintruski
Unconfirmed Member
almost 100 percent sure all three crysis games were gaming evolved titles which means developed with AMD and the only crysis that ran better on Nvidia before a few driver releases was crysis (original) crytech are well known for bring tesseellation happy, just look at the frog in the crysis 3 trailer....
To some degree yes, but there is no doubt Gameworks effects are heavily biased towards Nvidia GPUs therefore AMD hardware has trouble keeping up. I think Nvidia allow AMD to optimize those effects even though the former claims this is standard industry practice.
It would perhaps entice more devs to make use of the Gameworks library if they know it runs as well as it can on all hardware.
Wrong. The first two are Nvidia sponsored games.almost 100 perfect sure all three crysis games were gaming evolved titles which means developed with AMD and the only crysis that ran better on Nvidia before a few driver releases was crysis (original) I would know I'm a huge fan.
UE4 is really interesting because they included many other middlewares too. For example Simplygon that CDPR uses in Red Engine is included in UE4 you just need to add licence and you are ready to go. Nvidia went to Epic and offered them their tech.
And i am sure that Epic would never compromise their engine performance because that is their main source of income. And yet we see Nvidia tech integration on Engine level.
As far as i know only studio that uses AMD tech is Square Enix and to be more precise that is mostly Nixxes studio that handles PC ports.
Saintruski
Unconfirmed Member
crytech themselves are responsible for the tessellation
like seriously....
then AMD responsible for everything in post 127
like seriously....
then AMD responsible for everything in post 127
Codemasters too, and other devs from the Gaming Evolved program.
Unknown Soldier
Member
You haven't even bothered to address any of my points but you did a nice job to slip in a complaint about some "passive-aggressive" tone which you probably imagined since nothing in my post is intended to be insulting. My post stands exactly as I have written it and requires no further explanation. You can take it or leave it.
The lock-in features are the very definition of competition. You know what's anti-competitive? Forcing a company to open up proprietary technologies so another company which is losing can compete better. That's literally the opposite of how competition works. Nvidia invented it, and they aren't sharing. You keep what you invent. You invented it, it belongs to you, and you do what you want with it. That's competition.
Many people have explained many times why Intel's top-end CPU performance has not iterated dramatically for the past 5-6 years. I've explained it myself multiple times on GAF. I'm tired of it, figure out why yourself.
Pretty much my issue with AMD. They do the bare minimum then complain when another company does more and as a result their technology is picked and used.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
What have CDPR done now the scoundrels?
veggiesaurus
Member
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? Performance is crippled on amd cards as well as kepler, due to poorer tessellation performance. The tessellation factors used in hairworks on Witcher3 are a little ridiculous as well. At least give us some control over it!
Edit: I mean specifically hair works performance. At least it's not a core game feature, and can be easily disabled.
General Lee
Member
I know full well why Intel performance is what it is, and why it costs what it costs right now. A lot of it has to do with not having any competition. This has also been explained thoroughly elsewhere and I'm tired too, so figure out why yourself.
Lock-in features certainly are a way of competition, but it's not good for us the consumers in this particular case. It's competitive in a way that's trying to prevent further competition.
The 780Ti has 3x the tessellation performance compared to the 290X and it is about equal with the 980 (Source) so if it was purely tessellation you would not expect the Kepler architecture to tank in the way it does.
There is obviously more than just high levels of tessellation going on with HairWorks.
Pestilence11
Member
Excellent post.
Unknown Soldier
Member
LMAO, parroting my own post back at me as a comeback. So you really don't have anything to say.
I have a better idea. Link me to your explanation, and if you do I'll search my own post history and link you to mine.
Intel's performance is what it is precisely because they have competition. You just don't seem to know who their competitor is. Hint: it's not AMD and hasn't been for a decade now.
Isn't the point of competing to try and win? If you're winning a lot, doesn't that by it's very nature inherently reduce further competition? I mean that's how business works. And Nvidia, well they've been winning for about a decade now. You can't really help it if you're winning that much, but it's not a competition anymore if you purposely stop winning for awhile to let the loser catch up.
Exactly. Not everything has to be open source for there to be genuine competition. Because Nvidia developed these techniques and implemented them it's obvious that they are going to run better on Nvidia cards. This is an important goal for Nvidia, they invest money in these effects to positively differentiate their products from that of their competitor.
Some people in this thread have argued that it would be beneficial to gamers if all these gameworks effects would be open source so they could run better on AMD hardware. While it is true this would benefit gamers, it assumes everything else would be the same. But it is clear from commentary by developers that use gameworks effects that Nvidia spends a not insignificant amount of time and money implementing these effects in games, communicating with developers long before they release their game (and that's not even accounting the money Nvidia has to spend to develop these techniques). If they do all that, make it open source, and when the game releases all the proprietary Nvidia tech runs just as good on AMD cards, what would have been the point for Nvidia to invest all this money in the first place?
Gameworks effect have become almost a staple for big important PC releases. Nividia abandoning gameworks or making it open source would likely only result in a dramatic decrease in the games that use these advanced effects, you only have to look at how many developers use AMD's open source alternatives (almost nobody) to see how much time and money developers are interested in spending on this without significant development aid by a company like Nvidia. It sucks for AMD owners that these effects don't run as good on their cards as they do on Nvidia's, but it would suck even more if these effects wouldn't be in these games in the first place. The succes of gameworks shouldn't be a reason for Nvidia to change their bussiness practice, it should be reason for AMD to step up their game.