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[Ke0]

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.

So basically it's like 99% of American, no scratch that 99% of all companies world wide operate?

The only reason why this thread is even a thing is because

1. There are only two companies competing with each other
2. One of those two companies do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to developer relations and marketing and as such people think the "winning" company should be nice and throw them a bone to cover for losing company's inadequacies.

AMD has had ample opportunity to do more than they do in every sector. AMD's business sense is poor. While Nvidia was making moves into the ARM sector, AMD decided to make fucking desktop RAM which has crazy low profit margin. When Nvidia was courting the HPC sector, AMD did nothing, their Fire based GPU drivers blew large chunks, while Nvidia developed relationships with companies that used Quadro, that's not Nvidia's fault that's AMD's. Nvidia created frameworks for many of these sectors to use in CUDA, AMD would just give cards out and say "There's some open source stuff out there you guys can use!". Actually this part is a lie because AMD didn't do much card giving.

Actually that's exactly what AMD did with the HPC sector. Nvidia said OpenCL wasn't mature enough for these companies and instead of telling the companies to make it themsevles, Nvidia made it for them so all these companies had to do was buy their GPU. Nvidia wasn't obligated to make their shit play nice with AMD hardware, when AMD could have led the charge on OpenCL and give it the kick it needed to be mature and easy enough for companies to use.

All of this has a snowball effect. AMD has no one to blame but themselves. Open source works best when it's a clearly superior alternative to proprietary. Open source isn't magically better strictly because it's open source. AMD might have TressFX, but if the developer has to jump through hoops to get it up and running and AMD offers very little developer support, developers aren't obligated to use it because it's "open source!!" When it might end up costing them more money. Best tools and resources will win out in the end, whether that be open source or proprietary.

AMD stretches itself too thin trying to be a CPU and GPU company and compete with CPU company as well as competing with a GPU company. And that's yet another reason why the landscape is the way it currently is, that again is not Nvidia's fault.

 

[veggiesaurus]

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.

That's interesting, I guess there's something weird going on in the drivers as well. Even though I'm a 970 owner, I'd still like some fine grain control over the tessellation factors used. Might get a few extra fps by reducing it.

 

[antonz]

Hairworks issues are more with optimization or more appropriately the lack of it.

Frankly it is not in Nvidias interest to make it work smoothly for anything but its best of the best. They do not want you content with your 3 or 4 year old GPU that is more than good enough.

They will sabotage their own performance as much as they will AMDs. 16X Tessellation is basically identical to 8X in hairworks. 8X basically does everything 16X does using a fraction of the GPU power.
AMD users just lucked out because AMD still allows them to override settings like Tessellation.

 

[Saintruski]

So basically it's like 99% of American, no scratch that 99% of all companies world wide operate?

The only reason why this thread is even a thing is because

1. There are only two companies competing with each other
2. One of those two companies do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to developer relations and marketing and as such people think the "winning" company should be nice and throw them a bone to cover for losing company's inadequacies.

AMD has had ample opportunity to do more than they do in every sector. AMD's business sense is poor. While Nvidia was making moves into the ARM sector, AMD decided to make fucking desktop RAM which has crazy low profit margin. When Nvidia was courting the HPC sector, AMD did nothing, their Fire based GPU drivers blew large chunks, while Nvidia developed relationships with companies that used Quadro, that's not Nvidia's fault that's AMD's. Nvidia created frameworks for many of these sectors to use in CUDA, AMD would just give cards out and say "There's some open source stuff out there you guys can use!". Actually this part is a lie because AMD didn't do much card giving.

Actually that's exactly what AMD did with the HPC sector. Nvidia said OpenCL wasn't mature enough for these companies and instead of telling the companies to make it themsevles, Nvidia made it for them so all these companies had to do was buy their GPU. Nvidia wasn't obligated to make their shit play nice with AMD hardware, when AMD could have led the charge on OpenCL and give it the kick it needed to be mature and easy enough for companies to use.

All of this has a snowball effect. AMD has no one to blame but themselves. Open source works best when it's a clearly superior alternative to proprietary. Open source isn't magically better strictly because it's open source. AMD might have TressFX, but if the developer has to jump through hoops to get it up and running and AMD offers very little developer support, developers aren't obligated to use it because it's "open source!!" When it might end up costing them more money. Best tools and resources will win out in the end, whether that be open source or proprietary.

AMD stretches itself too thin trying to be a CPU and GPU company and compete with CPU company as well as competing with a GPU company. And that's yet another reason why the landscape is the way it currently is, that again is not Nvidia's fault.

I love you I want im going to write you on on my next ballot for president...I love common sense, reasoning, and well done research of companies past relations with its customers in the industries such as developers and HPC.

 

[cripterion]

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.

Why would they make tech they develop run better on competing hardware?

 

[badb0y]

Why would they make tech they develop run better on competing hardware?

nVidia don't even like to make games run on their own cards if their not currently selling them. Yea I'm a salty Kepler owner.

 

[sega4ever]

nVidia don't even like to make games run on their own cards if their not currently selling them. Yea I'm a salty Kepler owner.

nvidia already said they are working on fixes.

 

[General Lee]

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.

You failed to give any proof to your claims so I parroted your post because it was such a useless post to make I thought it would make you realize how silly it looks. LMAOing doesn't really help to make your case or make me want to prove anything to you. Sorry buddy, argumentation just doesn't work that way. If all you've got is LMAO, don't bother responding.

The short of it is that Intel is making billions, and they could easily sell their chips for less if they had competition to force them to do so. And the context I'm talking about is HIGH-END, it has nothing to do with how Intel needs to compete in the low power mobile market. They practiced anticompetitive behavior in the past and that is in part the reason for their current success. Nvidia is aiming to parrot this with their lock-in features they push hard to be integrated in games.

The point I'm trying to make about competition isn't some theoretical definition of it, but how it affects us consumers. Lock-in features have the potential to make us want to buy that product for short-term benefit, but in Nvidia's viewpoint they are there to try force you to keep buying their GPUs. It's a cutthroat tactic and not really surprising considering what sort of a guy the CEO of Nvidia seems like. They're of course free to try such tactics, I simply fault consumers and devs/publishers for think short-term and falling for it.

So basically it's like 99% of American, no scratch that 99% of all companies world wide operate?

Yes, it's a thing that happens all the time in business, it's marketing 101. And that's why I happen to know it's not there for our benefit, it's there for companies to try hinder other companies ability to compete.

 

[Kezen]

Why would they make tech they develop run better on competing hardware?

They could make it non destructive in competing hardware, even though I understand their willingness to make the most of their geometry performance. Hairworks uses "isoline" tessellation and pre Tonga GCN usually does not fare too well, with that said Hairworks in Far Cry 4 is not more taxing on Nvidia hardware than it is on AMD's :
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/01/12/far_cry_4_graphics_features_performance_review/5#.VWBELk882Uk

Apparently in The Witcher 3 it runs better on Nvidia hardware.

 

[badb0y]

nvidia already said they are working on fixes.

I don't care what they said, there has been a clear downward trend comparing Kepler to Maxwell and AMD's 200 series. The 290X used to trail the 780 Ti on average, now it matches or exceeds it. The 290 and the 780 used to go toe to toe and now the 290 is the clearly better. They stopped optimizing Kepler for a while now, The Witcher 3 just brought the problem to the forefront.

 

[Saintruski]

You failed to give any proof to your claims so I parroted your post because it was such a useless post to make I thought it would make you realize how silly it looks. LMAOing doesn't really help to make your case or make me want to prove anything to you. Sorry buddy, argumentation just doesn't work that way. If all you've got is LMAO, don't bother responding.

The short of it is that Intel is making billions, and they could easily sell their chips for less if they had competition to force them to do so. And the context I'm talking about is HIGH-END, it has nothing to do with how Intel needs to compete in the low power mobile market. They practiced anticompetitive behavior in the past and that is in part the reason for their current success. Nvidia is aiming to parrot this with their lock-in features they push hard to be integrated in games.

The point I'm trying to make about competition isn't some theoretical definition of it, but how it affects us consumers. Lock-in features have the potential to make us want to buy that product for short-term benefit, but in Nvidia's viewpoint they are there to try force you to keep buying their GPUs. It's a cutthroat tactic and not really surprising considering what sort of a guy the CEO of Nvidia seems like. They're of course free to try such tactics, I simply fault consumers and devs/publishers for think short-term and falling for it.



Yes, it's a thing that happens all the time in business, it's marketing 101. And that's why I happen to know it's not there for our benefit, it's there for companies to try hinder other companies ability to compete.

what Intel did as far as I'm aware is fudge some benchmark numbers and pay off some OEMs, however that's not why they are where they are today, you should leave Intel out of this, There competition is not AMD, they are not even in this discussion, Intel competes with the big boys like Samsung, IBM, Oracle and even google...they have invested in other markets and techs that scale well to their x86 chips...which is why they are where they are today. They compete in the foundry buisness TSMC, GLOFLO...


Nvidia is competing as stated by the president earlier in this thread...AMD is not...the only anticompetitive company here is AMD for not working on developer relations and trying to force another to cut them some slack for being lazy im that area. Nvidia are go getters I support go getters. I don't support self entitled ass sitters like AMD.

AMD has crap relation with the people they sell their product to other than the gamers. from HPC to Devs, they don't support their hardware well either. Not to mention they spread themselves way to thin and on stuff that wont even scale on their portfolio. they need to tighten it up and mske a relations division.

see posts 127 and 151 for more info.

 

[FunkyLounge]

A market?

Nvidia sells G-Sync for a premium price of adding more than $200. Makes it exclusive to their cards.
AMD finds a cheaper solution, Freesync, that any tech company can use. Also will become standard to every monitor.

Is Nvidia's tech really exclusive to their cards? Or are they just playing some monopoly strategy "partnering" with developers and screwing consumers?

I may be more jaded than you, but this to me is the perfect example of market. I fully expect everybody to take every inch in whatever way possible. You roll punches all around and if that hurts the competition even better. That is what capitalism and market is, simple as that.

And I think the talk about freesync becoming standard to every monitor is way too early. Sure, I wish it will, but I don't have my hopes that far.

 

[Refreshment.01]

This is Nvidia putting itself inline for the player.

Instead of supporting the despised ''platform parity'', they did what a lot of gamers asked: Disparity.

It seems to be working just right XD

 

[General Lee]

what Intel did as far as I'm aware is fudge some benchmark numbers and pay off some OEMs, however that's not why they are where they are today, you should leave Intel out of this, There competition is not AMD, they are not even in this discussion, Intel competes with the big boys like Samsung, IBM, Oracle and even google...they have invested in other markets and techs that scale well to their x86 chips...which is why they are where they are today. They compete in the foundry buisness TSMC, GLOFLO...

And who's to say what would the market be like if AMD had succeeded back when they were at the top of their game, and Intel hadn't used their underhanded tactics? I'm not going to elaborate this further as it's off-topic.

Nvidia is competing as stated by the president earlier in this thread...AMD is not...the only anticompetitive company here is AMD for not working on developer relations.

If by that you mean they're spending millions trying to prevent further competition, then yes, they're competing fiercely. And what you're asking is AMD should be wasting their money doing the same. And the end result would be half the games with Nvidia exclusive features and half AMD exclusive. What a wonderful future. dot dot dot

I can't help but to think this is some sort of fundamental difference between how American businesses and the rest of the world sees competitive behavior. It's probably a bit unfair to single out America, but they're the epitome of this sort of philosophy in business and politics. It's not just about creating better products or promoting your agenda, it's at least half as much about smear campaigning and trying to prevent them from competing altogether. AMD does the former, Nvidia the latter. It's crazy how much money spent on this could be used to actually create value for the consumer.

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

So is AMD's fault that Nvidia is paying money to devs to use their "black box" middleware? We know that their drivers suck and all that, but when a devs makes an exclusive deal with Nividia because moneyz, I don't think is AMD fault there. Exclusivities suck in any gamng camp, the only real affected here are always the end user.

 

[Saintruski]

And who's to say what would the market be like if AMD had succeeded back when they were at the top of their game, and Intel hadn't used their underhanded tactics? I'm not going to elaborate this further as it's off-topic.


If by that you mean they're spending millions trying to prevent further competition, then yes, they're competing fiercely. And what you're asking is AMD should be wasting their money doing the same. And the end result would be half the games with Nvidia exclusive features and half AMD exclusive. What a wonderful future. dot dot dot

I can't help but to think this is some sort of fundamental difference between how American businesses and the rest of the world sees competitive behavior. It's probably a bit unfair to single out America, but they're the epitome of this sort of philosophy in business and politics. It's not just about creating better products or promoting your agenda, it's at least half as much about smear campaigning and trying to prevent them from competing altogether. AMD does the former, Nvidia the latter. It's crazy how much money spent on this could be used to actually create value for the consumer.

the fact you quoted this "what Intel did as far as I'm aware is fudge some benchmark numbers and pay off some OEMs, however that's not why they are where they are today, you should leave Intel out of this, There competition is not AMD, they are not even in this discussion, Intel competes with the big boys like Samsung, IBM, Oracle and even google...they have invested in other markets and techs that scale well to their x86 chips...which is why they are where they are today. They compete in the foundry buisness TSMC, GLOFLO..."and retorted with useless crap unrelated to anything AMD ACTUALLY did... why is that? because you ignored everything else I said in that and read nothing else AMD NEVER DOES ANYTHIG ABOUT ANYTHING EVER instead focused on two anti buisness practices which AMD have ALSO done like lying to investors (pending suit) which gives them more money. you know what AMD did sold their foundries and bought an in the red money leaking ATI and all their debt...your waste of time


PS AMD is the biggest at smear campaign see AMD roy and the fixer videos.

and I'll let you read the rest of last post again since you missed it. "Nvidia is competing as stated by the president earlier in this thread...AMD is not...the only anticompetitive company here is AMD for not working on developer relations and trying to force another to cut them some slack for being lazy im that area. Nvidia are go getters I support go getters. I don't support self entitled ass sitters like AMD.

AMD has crap relation with the people they sell their product to other than the gamers. from HPC to Devs, they don't support their hardware well either. Not to mention they spread themselves way to thin and on stuff that wont even scale on their portfolio. they need to tighten it up and mske a relations division.

see posts 127 and 151 for more info."

 

[Lanrutcon]

Every story has 2 sides.

All I know is Nvidia's shit works more often and better than AMD's. If AMD wants my monies, they need to step up.

 

[H4r4kiri]

I must be damn lucky reading some posts in here, because my R9 290 is running great on Ultra settings without a hitch with Witcher 3. Not a single crash or game freeze yet, and smooth FPS.

same for me and even Hairworks on

 

[nelsonroyale]

I am not much of a fan of Nvidia as a company that is for sure.

This is Nvidia putting itself inline for the player.

Instead of supporting the despised ''platform parity'', they did what a lot of gamers asked: Disparity.

It seems to be working just right XD

Hahaha...that is one way of looking at it!

 

[PnCIa]

I used to be a huge ATI fan back in the days when i was dumb enough to be a fanboy.

Nowadays i just see it like this: Nvidia is far superior on the software side, period. I would love to see a 50/50 or even 60/40 split on the GPU market (same goes for CPUs), buuuut it will not happen when AMD doesnt manage to get proper driver support on day one of a huge release like Witcher 3. I dont know why they cant do it, maybe their management is a mess, maybe they just dont have enough money, and therefore cant afford to support every big game right from the start. I dont know.
What i know is this, the average person sees that Nvidia announces a new driver for a major release and through that, he or she feels supported by the GPU manufacturer they invested money into. AMD is late a lot of times.
Sure NVIDIA tries to fuck them up even more, but they can totally afford it because a large part of the market runs their stuff anyway. I get the feeling that AMD needs a big investment that gives them way more resources, and maybe a new management that can actually handle the situation, if they want to stay relevant or rather, if they want to become relevant again.

 

[orava]

AMD should stop being a little bitch and release something worthwhile.

 

[Zemm]

We should have both Nvidia and AMD technology on every PC game period. Each one with its own thing. Im tired of the exclusive technology bullshit ruining the experience.

Agreed. Maybe I'm just a fan of open source stuff but either company keeping anything hidden and exclusive just rubs me the wrong way, especially when it's so customers of the other company get a worse performing game.

 

[Kysen]

Every story has 2 sides.

All I know is Nvidia's shit works more often and better than AMD's. If AMD wants my monies, they need to step up.

Why should they step up when they can blame gameworks, Nvidia, the devs(PCars) anyone but themselves. /s

 

[Seanspeed]

How?! I have a 670 and Ultra basically cripples my framerate to 15-25 FPS.

He said 'pretty much'. Guessing if you turn things like Foliage Distance and Shadows down from Ultra, then turn Hairworks off, you should get mostly Ultra settings at a locked 30fps.

 

[munroe]

Agreed. Maybe I'm just a fan of open source stuff but either company keeping anything hidden and exclusive just rubs me the wrong way, especially when it's so customers of the other company get a worse performing game.

I don't think some people know how competition works. Nvidia creating exclusive technology is no different than say MS and Sony having game exclusives on their consoles, companies will have exclusivities to entice customers and set themselves apart from the rest of the competition.

If everyone was to do the same thing, what's the point in having the company in the first place if not to do something different. If companies are going to invest large amounts of money to create these new technologies then they expect a decent return, if that means exclusivity and then increase card sales then so be it, not spend large amounts then just freely hand it out to anyone that wants to use it.

 

[Heigic]

I blame the game developers. Nvidia can release all the GameWorks stuff they want but developers still need to sign up for it and screw over part of their customer base for some money.

 

[Ke0]

Yes, it's a thing that happens all the time in business, it's marketing 101. And that's why I happen to know it's not there for our benefit, it's there for companies to try hinder other companies ability to compete.

So why are you complaining about Nvidia and not AMD? Why are you insinuating that Nvidia should play nice with AMD? Why should Nvidia NOT run their company like a for profit entity when that's exactly what it is? Nvidia shouldn't have to be all open and nice because they're business sense is better than the competition. AMD should be getting dragged for having absolute poor business sense that bring us to our current situation.

Yes if you're an AMD owner you're getting fucked, but if you're an AMD owner you should be getting mad at AMD. You should be mad that AMD decided to make desktop ram and not follow Nvidia into the ARM race. You should be getting mad at AMD for not actually supporting their Fire line of GPUs like Nvidia supports their Quadro line of GPUs. You should be getting mad at AMD being half ass with their open source solutions. It's open source because you're suppose to contribute, not so you can let everyone else make it better for you and bring it up to par then swoop in and be like "fuck yea thanks guys!"

As a person who has owned several AMD cards, I'm personally tired of AMD introducing a bunch of solutions, them being half baked and AMD doing fuck all with them, but rather expecting the industry to do all the work for them. Then consumers get upset and blame Nvidia when developers choose their solution instead...that's not Nvidia's fault and honestly I think vast majority of you know that, some of you just can't bring yourselves to actually place blame where it should be.

It's not like AMD didn't have ample opportunities to cut Nvidia off before their own proprietary solutions took off. You want to know why your card sucks running X game? Because AMD has the business sense of a high school history buff. Nvidia is under no obligation to feel bad for AMD not knowing what the hell they're doing, nor is Nvidia under any obligation to spend multiple millions on software engineering then turn around and give it away for free because the competing company can't be arsed to do it themselves.

Nvidia offers these a developers an alternative to trying to roll all these systems themselves and even offer help getting it up and running. No different than MS/DX11/DX12 and XBO or any other software suite really.

It's clear from this thread that many people don't understand how competition works, and worse what open source is about. Too many people are under the delusion that just because something is open source that means it will get used over proprietary, or worse they act like developers are obligated to use open source software because it's open source. If the open source solution is worse than a proprietary solution then guess what? They're not going to use the open source solution.

 

[Thorgal]

So why are you complaining about Nvidia and not AMD? Why are you insinuating that Nvidia should play nice with AMD? Why should Nvidia NOT run their company like a for profit entity when that's exactly what it is? Nvidia shouldn't have to be all open and nice because they're business sense is better than the competition. AMD should be getting dragged for having absolute poor business sense that bring us to our current situation.

Yes if you're an AMD owner you're getting fucked, but if you're an AMD owner you should be getting mad at AMD. You should be mad that AMD decided to make desktop ram and not follow Nvidia into the ARM race. You should be getting mad at AMD for not actually supporting their Fire line of GPUs like Nvidia supports their Quadro line of GPUs. You should be getting mad at AMD being half ass with their open source solutions. It's open source because you're suppose to contribute, not so you can let everyone else make it better for you and bring it up to par then swoop in and be like "fuck yea thanks guys!"

As a person who has owned several AMD cards, I'm personally tired of AMD introducing a bunch of solutions, them being half baked and AMD doing fuck all with them, but rather expecting the industry to do all the work for them. Then consumers get upset and blame Nvidia when developers choose their solution instead...that's not Nvidia's fault and honestly I think vast majority of you know that, some of you just can't bring yourselves to actually place blame where it should be.

It's not like AMD didn't have ample opportunities to cut Nvidia off before their own proprietary solutions took off. You want to know why your card sucks running X game? Because AMD has the business sense of a high school history buff. Nvidia is under no obligation to feel bad for AMD not knowing what the hell they're doing, nor is Nvidia under any obligation to spend multiple millions on software engineering then turn around and give it away for free because the competing company can't be arsed to do it themselves.

Nvidia offers these a developers an alternative to trying to roll all these systems themselves and even offer help getting it up and running. No different than MS/DX11/DX12 and XBO or any other software suite really.

It's clear from this thread that many people don't understand how competition works, and worse what open source is about. Too many people are under the delusion that just because something is open source that means it will get used over proprietary, or worse they act like developers are obligated to use open source software because it's open source. If the open source solution is worse than a proprietary solution then guess what? They're not going to use the open source solution.

Excellent post .

AMD only have themselves to blame here .

 

[General Lee]

So why are you complaining about Nvidia and not AMD? Why are you insinuating that Nvidia should play nice with AMD? Why should Nvidia NOT run their company like a for profit entity when that's exactly what it is? Nvidia shouldn't have to be all open and nice because they're business sense is better than the competition. AMD should be getting dragged for having absolute poor business sense that bring us to our current situation.

I'm saying customers, devs and publishers shouldn't go with it because the tactic will harm us in the long run. I don't want to buy two GPUs to play all the games I want, and I don't want to be locked to Nvidia like I already am to Intel. Why Nvidia and not AMD? Because they're the one doing it right now. I have no delusions that AMD would be all that different if the positions were switched. I'm not here to be an AMD apologist.

Yes if you're an AMD owner you're getting fucked, but if you're an AMD owner you should be getting mad at AMD. You should be mad that AMD decided to make desktop ram and not follow Nvidia into the ARM race. You should be getting mad at AMD for not actually supporting their Fire line of GPUs like Nvidia supports their Quadro line of GPUs. You should be getting mad at AMD being half ass with their open source solutions. It's open source because you're suppose to contribute, not so you can let everyone else make it better for you and bring it up to par then swoop in and be like "fuck yea thanks guys!"

The topic of this thread is not about that, though. AMD has made their share of mistakes, but it has no bearing on the matter at hand. I was discussing whether Nvidia's GameWorks is ok or not. Not what AMD has or hasn't been doing. If AMD had 70% of market share this day and was going all at it with a similar tactic Nvidia is, I'd still be shaking my head thinking I'm going to have to buy GPUs from two different vendors to get good performance in all the games I play.

A lot of people seem to be talking across points and simply AMD bashing for some reason or another, in a topic that's supposed to be about Nvidia's GameWorks and how they're using this to strong-arm the market under their control. And apparently it's perfectly fine to many. You've seen how the CPU market has evolved, expect the same for GPUs if Nvidia gets their way thanks to everyone buying into the GameWorks Experience, "The way it's meant to be crippled". Nvidia is great at marketing and a lot of people eat their word hook, line and sinker, and spend their days bashing AMD on the forums for free.

 

[dex3108]

I'm saying customers, devs and publishers shouldn't go with it because the tactic will harm us in the long run. I don't want to buy two GPUs to play all the games I want, and I don't want to be locked to Nvidia like I already am to Intel. Why Nvidia and not AMD? Because they're the one doing it right now. I have no delusions that AMD would be all that different if the positions were switched. I'm not here to be an AMD apologist.



The topic of this thread is not about that, though. AMD has made their share of mistakes, but it has no bearing on the matter at hand. I was discussing whether Nvidia's GameWorks is ok or not. Not what AMD has or hasn't been doing. If AMD had 70% of market share this day and was going all at it with a similar tactic Nvidia is, I'd still be shaking my head thinking I'm going to have to buy GPUs from two different vendors to get good performance in all the games I play.

A lot of people seem to be talking across points and simply AMD bashing for some reason or another, in a topic that's supposed to be about Nvidia's GameWorks and how they're using this to strong-arm the market under their control. And apparently it's perfectly fine to many. You've seen how the CPU market has evolved, expect the same for GPUs if Nvidia gets their way thanks to everyone buying into the GameWorks Experience, "The way it's meant to be crippled". Nvidia is great at marketing and a lot of people eat their word hook, line and sinker, and spend their days bashing AMD on the forums for free.

You are asking if GameWorks is ok and i say it is. Why? Because it is optional. HairWorks, HBAO+, TXAA, PhysX Turbulence etc. can be disabled in every game i think. That tech is in some way reward for choosing Nvidia brand. So it is GeForce Experience. As we saw before PhysX is included in UE4 and in Unity current two most popular engines and guess what it works on AMD and Nvidia hardware and AMD never complained about that integration.

 

[RealityCheque]

Hairworks seemed to put plenty of strain on my 970, couldn't hold 60fps.

With it turned off, no problem. If Nvidia is purposely hammering older cards to try and "encourage" people to upgrade, then they aren't doing it right judging by the performance hit on Maxwell.

 

[Tworak]

hairworks is the dumbest shit ever. it looks bad and it runs worse. amd should celebrate it since it keeps nvidia focused on developing the pointless thing, and not something else that might actually be worthwhile.

hbao+ is cool, though.

 

[Sijil]

Tressfx does not work great on my 770/i7 4790 combo, it cut my fps in half, from 60 to 30.

 

[23qwerty]

hairworks is the dumbest shit ever. it looks bad and it runs worse. amd should celebrate it since it keeps nvidia focused on developing the pointless thing, and not something else that might actually be worthwhile.

hbao+ is cool, though.

Looks, bad? No, it looks amazing.
Worth it relative to performance cost? Definitely no in most cases.

 

[lukeskymac]

Jen-Hsun has said many times he admires Apple and the way they operate and that is clearly shown in their products nowadays. All the way down to sabotaging their older products to promote new ones (RIP Kepler).

Yeah, Apple loves sabotaging their products so much, they're going to make a special version of iOS 9 just so my aging iPhone 4S can live another year with software updates. /s

I thought most of GAF was above the current fashion of blind Apple hate.

 

[Durante]

Hairworks seemed to put plenty of strain on my 970, couldn't hold 60fps.

With it turned off, no problem. If Nvidia is purposely hammering older cards to try and "encourage" people to upgrade, then they aren't doing it right judging by the performance hit on Maxwell.

Tressfx does not work great on my 770/i7 4790 combo, it cut my fps in half, from 60 to 30.

It's almost like hair simulation is simply expensive in general, and there are no conspiracy theories required to explain its performance regardless of which vendor's implementation is used!

 

[dr_rus]

So did AMD optimize TressFX for NV hardware or provided NV with TressFX source code so they could've optimized it before any TressFX-game shipped?

 

[knerl]

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/

Think he means the advanced features of PhysX. The ones that are built specifically for Nvidia hardware. PhysX as such is a complete physics library after all. Just like havoc for example.

 

[General Lee]

It's almost like hair simulation is simply expensive in general, and there are no conspiracy theories required to explain its performance regardless of which vendor's implementation is used!

We haven't yet seen what TressFX 3.0 is capable on PC, but it could be considerably lighter based on what we've seen from the slides and 2.0 on PS4.

 

[knerl]

Tressfx does not work great on my 770/i7 4790 combo, it cut my fps in half, from 60 to 30.

Personally TressFX has been working a lot better on my nvidia based cards I've had lately than on the ones I've had from AMD. My GTX 970 performed better while using TressFX than my 290X did for example.

 

[lukeskymac]

It's almost like hair simulation is simply expensive in general, and there are no conspiracy theories required to explain its performance regardless of which vendor's implementation is used!

Hard not to think of conspiracy theories when you see Kepler vs Maxwell performance numbers for Hairworks.

*removes fistfuls of salt from pockets*

 

[oxidax]

I don't think some people know how competition works. Nvidia creating exclusive technology is no different than say MS and Sony having game exclusives on their consoles, companies will have exclusivities to entice customers and set themselves apart from the rest of the competition.

If everyone was to do the same thing, what's the point in having the company in the first place if not to do something different. If companies are going to invest large amounts of money to create these new technologies then they expect a decent return, if that means exclusivity and then increase card sales then so be it, not spend large amounts then just freely hand it out to anyone that wants to use it.

Makes sense and its understandable competition, but its annoying that every time a PC game with Nvidia exclusive tech comes out and it screws over AMD users and even Nvidia users in this case. How would you feel if console games ran like shit on Xbox One because they have PS4 exclusive tech in it. That would not be fair now would it? But hey, its competition! Both consoles have the same chip but PS4 FTW! right?

Look at GTAV for example and look at all the Nvidia and AMD tech on that game. It should be our decision to choose which card to buy to play this game because of all the technology we can get with each card. THAT should be the competition. Now with W3 im supposed to choose Nvidia over AMD because they screwed over the users? Thats not competition.

I don't need Physx on my Radeon cards but I don't want to be punished because im running an AMD card on a game that has Nvidia exclusive tech. And AMD need to put their fucking pants on already.

 

[Dictator93]

Hard not to think of conspiracy theories when you see Kepler vs Maxwell performance numbers for Hairworks.

*removes fistfuls of salt from pockets*

One thing hair works should have, preferably, would be more tweakable ini parameters. Controlling its tesselation values and distances would do a lot to calm people from being upset.

 

[UpDownLeftRight]

nvidia already said they are working on fixes.

Then they better get the fuck on it. I don't like AMD so Nvidia is my choice for pc parts. I was planning on buying a Pascal card but not if the kepler cards aren't brought up to speed. I can't afford to upgrade as regularly as it seems Nvidia would like.

 

[Durante]

One thing hair works should have, preferably, would be more tweakable ini parameters. Controlling its tesselation values and distances would do a lot to calm people from being upset.

While I don't really believe in the motive of "calming upset people" (for anything, but particularly for graphics options ), having individual control over things like strand density and tesselation level for HairWorks, at least in an ini file, would be neat.

 

[dex3108]

Think he means the advanced features of PhysX. The ones that are built specifically for Nvidia hardware. PhysX as such is a complete physics library after all. Just like havoc for example.

Most of advanced features are now re branded as GameWorks. That includes ShadowWorks, HairWorks, TurfEffects, WaveWorks...

And all of those are optional in any game that i saw. And no they are not build specifically for Nvidia hardware. Any hardware can run most of those. In theory they are built to take advantage of CUDA tech but most of those can run on CPU too.

 

[drotahorror]

Have been AMD user all my life when it comes to GPU's. You can bet your rear end I won't buy another. 7950 will RIP someday soon.

 

[Belmire]

I thought this whole thing would have been over once that "fix" came out from that reddit guy. Turning down tessellation on AMD cards through the control panel brought back performance to a reasonable level. The conspiracy should have ended right there. Either turn down tessellation or turn off hairworks and the game runs good again.

The other rumor is that Nvidia is not only crippling AMD cards but their own cards in order to force upgrades. People are reporting horrible 6xx/7xx performance. I loaded up the witcher 3 on my 780, turned off hairworks, turned down foliage distance / shadows one notch and was back at 60 fps/1080p. Is this unreasonable? Wouldn't you need the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest (arguable) features? You can't expect kepler (from 2012) to perform as well as maxwell on a AAA title pushing the graphics envelope released in 2015.

Nvidia trying to screw over AMD, maybe...but screwing over themselves. I think that's a stretch.

 

[Guri]

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.

I am not sure why that would give them less incentive. Like some have said here, Nvidia integrates their tech into popular engines and offers help to developers to optimise them. I showed the example of their bigger presence in social media. To me, that's a better differentiator than technologies. Now, to be clear, I'm not trying to dismiss them in any way and in fact I believe they are brilliant tech, but in the end, it's all about how they are implemented and how the developers and players can make use of them in terms of game design, gameplay features and so on.

If I, as a consumer and a developer, were to choose one in a scenario where the technologies are open, I would still go for Nvidia due to the reasons I said above and I have no doubt they would continue to innovate.

But we can always agree to disagree.

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.

I am sorry, but I won't continue to discuss with you. I am not here to have a "win or lose" discussion. I didn't address your arguments because they were not at all related to what I said. And since you continue to be passive-aggressive towards me and other users here, it is not worth to continue. None of us ever said that we want to buy Nvidia shares. We all have better things to do on a weekend and even things to worry about. So, again, sorry, but I won't continue this.

 

[Louis Cyphre]

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..

I have no issues them protecting their technology and not wanting to share it. What I do have issues with is strong-arming itself to work directly with the developer and leaving out competitors if this is what has occurred. I'm sick and tired of the consumer getting treated like they are being forced to go in a certain direction not because one company has better technology and consumers are eager to follow but because of these partnership deals taking place. We expect that type of thing with software that is exclusive to the hardware. The great thing about the pc platform is it's an open system and I'd like to see it remain that way.