23 ms·

AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance

121 points by mwill 11y ago

danmaz74 11y ago
"...AMD's chief gaming scientist..." this is some fancy position
- varelse 11y ago
  Well he does have a fancy degree in chemistry and that makes him a scientist!!!
fabian2k 11y ago
From all that I read, the game itself performs very well on AMD cards. The only exception is the Hairworks feature. But that has such a large impact even on high-end Nvidia cards that this is the first thing that one disables. It is probably the single most expensive setting in the game, and for a relatively small benefit.
white-flame 11y ago
So this is the screenshot with HairWorks enabled: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/05/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-pc-screenshot-002.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/... Is there a comparable one with it turned off? Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene (well, the chainmail does look amusingly flat where it goes over the shoulder). The hair might move nicely in gameplay, but it looks plain, garish, and low tech in a still. I suspect this works much better with dark hair, where the texture is not as noticeable as the silhouette.
- bhouston 11y ago
  > Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene The hair has nice shape and I believe it has physics, but it totally isn't shaded properly. I'm not sure if they are not using the proper Marschner shader (http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/concepts/expensive_shader.html http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/con...) or if the issue is they are not integrating the environmental lighting properly - could be both.
chao- 11y ago
There was an article back in March wherein a Stack Overflow (or Quora?) user comment about the hilariously porous boundary between game engines, drivers and actual hardware on GPUs. I'll see if I can find it because as much as I love a good ole shitshow of industry skulduggery, I can completely see a best-intentions effort leading to these sorts of unintended consequences (doing their best to get tessellation working, and so forth). Disclaimer of non-fanboy-ism: I don't play video games anymore, and only have graphics via Intel on my machine. No stock in Nvidia or AMD either. Edit: Found it, and my memory completely sucks. It was an article on gamedev.net about lower-level graphics APIs: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019 http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o...
- nextw33k 11y ago
  I remember reading that link and thinking about how the standards are not working. It also concerns me for the future of the open source graphics stack. If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base. I can only hope that the Mesa 3D stack comes to Windows in a meaningful way to ensure a common open 3D graphics library. Vulcan might shift the problem to the game engine from the driver but that's a long way off yet.
  - lsadam0 11y ago
    > . If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base. I'm an outsider, so it's easy for me to sit back and make blanket statements. That being said, the responsibility should lie on game developers to insure their games behave properly on hardware. Making proprietary drivers to address specific games is a bad development practice. Hardware markers should be responsible for insuring their drivers are accurately supporting standards. It just sounds like the whole games industry has fallen into some really bad development practices.
    - 11y ago
Shengbo 11y ago
If AMD's platform is really as good as they claim, why does everything run on the nVidia one? Also, I don't think this is an issue worth getting upset about, especially if you can just turn the feature off in-game. If the particular engine I'm using runs better on nVidia cards, then of course I'm going to prioritize their platform as a base for my hair simulations or whatever fancy extra stuff I want to have in there for people with high-end GPUs.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  > why does everything run on the nVidia one? What is "everything"? PC Gaming is nVidia centric because they put a lot of money behind it. AMD supplies the chips for all next gen consoles so by pure market penetration in the gaming market, I'm pretty sure they are doing quite well.
  - Shengbo 11y ago
    You're right, my wording wasn't clear. I was talking about the market they're complaining about. I just feel like it would be more beneficial to improve communication and developer support instead of generating negative PR by saying things like nvidia "completely sabotaged" performance when in fact all they really did according to developers is they had a good product and they were always available.
zamalek 11y ago
Solution: AMD optimizes HairWorks. Reality: complaining is easier. NVIDIA have always claimed that no exclusivity deals are signed with GameWorks. Others have [supposedly] always been welcome to assist game developers during the phases that NVIDIA gets proactively involved in. It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do they not have developer support; they actually play the victim because others take the initiative. For crying out loud, even Intel has game developer support/code. Correction: it turns out that AMD do actually have some open source libraries for game devs. The problem here isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA set out to optimize the game as best as they could for their hardware. AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by not getting involved. If I'm lazy and I get left behind that is my fault, not the fault of the other guy who did what I didn't do.
- chronid 11y ago
  Good luck optimizing for shader code you have no access to, because that is (was?) the situation, at least for some previous games that used it. Not even the developers of the games have any access to it. Gameworks actually prevents AMDs to optimize paths in their drivers. Exclusivity does not matter a bit. Note that AMD also has a program that help developers write shaders and optimize their engines to work better on AMD cards. But that does not prevent NVIDIA to see the code and optimize their own drivers accordingly. So, to me the problem here seems NVIDIA's attitude to sabotage (for no technical reason, except economics, see the physX on x86 debacle when they refused to compile code for something else that i386) performance on other platforms for their own gain. Like physX, Gameworks is already showing itself for what it is and will eventually fail and be forgotten. And people will believe that AMD is at fault for the next NVIDIA "magic technology" that brought no gain whatsoever to the gaming world.
- fabian2k 11y ago
  From what I read, AMD doesn't have access to the GameWorks source code. These features are also designed with the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs in mind, you can't really optimize around fundamental differences in the GPUs (e.g. the newest Nvidia cards are significantly better at tesselation).
jokoon 11y ago
Don't graphic drivers already optimize themselves for specific games ? I don't really know what's optimized underneath though...
- pjc50 11y ago
  From elsewhere in this thread, http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019 http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o... "Optimisation" may include "throw away the shaders provided by the game and replace them with entirely different ones written by NVIDIA for this specific game".
frik 11y ago
Witcher 3 had looked awesome on all press photos and in-game videos til last week. The finished game looks the same on all platforms, a highend PC runs on idle (30% Gpu). Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition (2011) has a pretty similar ggraphic. Assassins Creed Unity looks like a game from the future. Witcher 3 is a good game, but the PR wasn't that good. @down voter: do you mind to share your thoughts
- smtddr 11y ago
  I didn't downvote you.... but I bet others did because your comment doesn't speak to the debate covered in the article.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  True. The game is great and still looks very good, but considerably worse than the previews. Especially the lighting and the over-saturated colors. The PR team did good though, because visually the game has the same issues as Watch Dogs, but it isn't getting anywhere as much hate for it.
bhouston 11y ago
This has always been the point of NVIDIA's propertary game engine technology for more than a decade now - give it away for free or very often for big titles integrate it into game engines using NVIDIA developers (who often come to work on site.) Then once the game is released mention that it works better/looks better on NVIDIA technology than on competitors (AMD/Intel) GPU technology. And of course blame it not working well on AMD/Intel on their "inferior" technology. NVIDIA must be loving this controversy as it was the whole game plan all along.
- SloopJon 11y ago
  I read something very similar in this anonymous Slashdot post when Assassin's Creed Unity came out: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=48382141 http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=483821... Choice quote: "Nvidia literally doesn't care if bouncing ten simple particles on your screen uses 30% of your GPU performance, so long as the same effect on an AMD GPU takes 80%. Nvidia is this dirty."
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rrss1122 11y ago
    The thing is, I have an nVidia card and ACU doesn't even run on it. It feels like they are not only trying to deter people from buying AMD, but that they are also trying to deter people from buying lower tier nVidia cards. I have to get ACU down to sub-720p resolution to even get more than 20fps. It's ridiculous.
    - mesozoic 11y ago
      I think the problem there is just that ACU was just a very poorly made game.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    >So Nvidia 'invented' TXAA- an horrifically bad AA method both in appearance and 'hit' on performance- but a method that runs far better on new Nvidia hardware than it does on new AMD hardware. Why is that, though? Why can't AMD do whatever Nvidia's doing to make it just as fast on their system?
superskierpat 11y ago
What about that mention of recent updates making 7xx series graphic cards performance worse? I have a 750 in my laptop and yesterday I booted pillars of eternity and was having much more performance problems than usual.
phn 11y ago
I hope the new low-level API kids on the block, like metal and vulkan, can switch the fight to actually compete in having solid GPU performance, and benefit consumers in the end. Then, maybe a GPU independent HairThing™/intermediate level toolkits can actually flourish.
- tarpherder 11y ago
  Why not just DX12?
bd 11y ago
HairWorks is not something to be particularly upset about. Vast majority of players, even on high-end GPUs just keep turning off those "premium" IHV-specific features as they are just so heavy. BTW AMD kinda started this with their TressFX hairs (notably used in new Tomb Raider). It had similar characteristics to HairWorks - extremely expensive feature for relatively small overall visual impact, better running on AMD than Nvidia GPUs, but still running pretty bad even on high-end GPUs. Something to keep in mind: those super-duper features you see at GPU launch events, they are mostly just marketing, "halo effect" features, not practical enough to be used in games for almost everybody. -------- We are speaking about miniscule fraction of all players who have GPUs powerful enough to runs all bells and whistles. Titan X, the only GPU that can run Witcher 3 fast with HairWorks enabled [1], exists in so small numbers that it doesn't even show up in Steam Hardware survey [2]. GTX 980, the next most powerful GPU, is owned by less than 0.5% of all people who use Steam. And GTX 980 runs 1080p ultra with HairWorks just ~37-40 fps. GTX 970, the next most powerful GPU, the most popular Maxwell GPU, huge bestseller, is owned by ~3% of Steam users. It's the only remaining GPU that can stay above 30 fps with HairWorks on. So something like 95+ percent of all gamers are not affected by this issue at all. -------- [1] http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html [2] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
- sjwright 11y ago
  > BTW AMD kinda started this The difference is AMD's TressFX source code is open, which allowed Nvidia to resolve the performance disparity without much fuss. Whereas the Nvidia's HairWorks source code is closed, leaving AMD unable to pitch in engineering resource for a diagnosis or solution.
  - agapos 11y ago
    Also note the dates: Tomb Raider's TressFX happened in 2013 while Crysis 2 and the 'flat-surface tessellation' happened in 2011 (with Patch 1.8 I believe). Not something one can call a start.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
Arzh 11y ago
I'd like to point out the Slightly Mad quotes about working with AMD. I have never heard of a developer having a good experience with AMD. Even Carmak, the man with probably the most klote for a game programmer, has had a hard time getting help from them. Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro. Don't you mean why you haven't been choosing them. Or are you choosing AMD because they (supposedly) aren't nice to developers?
- VintageCool 11y ago
  s/klote/clout/
jcastro 11y ago
It should be noted that hairworks crushes the entire game no matter what GPU you have (Nvidia or otherwise) except for one, the Titan X, which retails just north of a thousand dollars. Everyone else is pretty much forced to turn down some setting or another to hit 60+ fps. And that's just at 1080p! I thought my GTX970 would handle it no problem, but there are still tweaks to be made.
yAnonymous 11y ago
Nvidia technologies have been heavily used in both these games: * Watch Dogs * The Witcher 3 Both suffer from technical problems with the graphics, don't perform as good as they could (across all systems) and look considerably worse than in the previews. I like Nvidia cards and drivers, but as a developer I'd stay very clear of Nvidia-exclusive technologies. I guess the business guys must like the free advertising.
shmerl 11y ago
So what are they going to use on Linux? Supposedly Witcher 3 is being ported. Weirdly, HairWorks uses DirectCompute, which makes it unportable anywhere outside Windows. May be with emergence of Vulkan, developers won't need to use these vendor specific APIs, since they'll have low level enough access to implement their own physics logic efficiently on all GPUs.
snowballsteve 11y ago
I was getting stoked about the Witcher 3 when I got some free time. All this talk is making me think twice about the game and not about my AMD card.

121 points by mwill 11y ago

danmaz74 11y ago

"...AMD's chief gaming scientist..." this is some fancy position

varelse 11y ago
Well he does have a fancy degree in chemistry and that makes him a scientist!!!

fabian2k 11y ago

From all that I read, the game itself performs very well on AMD cards. The only exception is the Hairworks feature. But that has such a large impact even on high-end Nvidia cards that this is the first thing that one disables. It is probably the single most expensive setting in the game, and for a relatively small benefit.

white-flame 11y ago

So this is the screenshot with HairWorks enabled: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/05/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-pc-screenshot-002.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/... Is there a comparable one with it turned off? Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene (well, the chainmail does look amusingly flat where it goes over the shoulder). The hair might move nicely in gameplay, but it looks plain, garish, and low tech in a still. I suspect this works much better with dark hair, where the texture is not as noticeable as the silhouette.

bhouston 11y ago
> Because that untextured hair looks completely out of place next to all the other nicely textured & shadowed parts of that scene The hair has nice shape and I believe it has physics, but it totally isn't shaded properly. I'm not sure if they are not using the proper Marschner shader (http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/concepts/expensive_shader.html http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/docs/con...) or if the issue is they are not integrating the environmental lighting properly - could be both.

chao- 11y ago

There was an article back in March wherein a Stack Overflow (or Quora?) user comment about the hilariously porous boundary between game engines, drivers and actual hardware on GPUs. I'll see if I can find it because as much as I love a good ole shitshow of industry skulduggery, I can completely see a best-intentions effort leading to these sorts of unintended consequences (doing their best to get tessellation working, and so forth). Disclaimer of non-fanboy-ism: I don't play video games anymore, and only have graphics via Intel on my machine. No stock in Nvidia or AMD either. Edit: Found it, and my memory completely sucks. It was an article on gamedev.net about lower-level graphics APIs: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019 http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o...

nextw33k 11y ago
I remember reading that link and thinking about how the standards are not working. It also concerns me for the future of the open source graphics stack. If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base. I can only hope that the Mesa 3D stack comes to Windows in a meaningful way to ensure a common open 3D graphics library. Vulcan might shift the problem to the game engine from the driver but that's a long way off yet.
- lsadam0 11y ago
  > . If the proprietary drivers are being updated to fix game specific problems, how are the open source drivers going to fair when the general rule for open source is not to have hacks within a code base. I'm an outsider, so it's easy for me to sit back and make blanket statements. That being said, the responsibility should lie on game developers to insure their games behave properly on hardware. Making proprietary drivers to address specific games is a bad development practice. Hardware markers should be responsible for insuring their drivers are accurately supporting standards. It just sounds like the whole games industry has fallen into some really bad development practices.
  - 11y ago

Shengbo 11y ago

If AMD's platform is really as good as they claim, why does everything run on the nVidia one? Also, I don't think this is an issue worth getting upset about, especially if you can just turn the feature off in-game. If the particular engine I'm using runs better on nVidia cards, then of course I'm going to prioritize their platform as a base for my hair simulations or whatever fancy extra stuff I want to have in there for people with high-end GPUs.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> why does everything run on the nVidia one? What is "everything"? PC Gaming is nVidia centric because they put a lot of money behind it. AMD supplies the chips for all next gen consoles so by pure market penetration in the gaming market, I'm pretty sure they are doing quite well.
- Shengbo 11y ago
  You're right, my wording wasn't clear. I was talking about the market they're complaining about. I just feel like it would be more beneficial to improve communication and developer support instead of generating negative PR by saying things like nvidia "completely sabotaged" performance when in fact all they really did according to developers is they had a good product and they were always available.

zamalek 11y ago

Solution: AMD optimizes HairWorks. Reality: complaining is easier. NVIDIA have always claimed that no exclusivity deals are signed with GameWorks. Others have [supposedly] always been welcome to assist game developers during the phases that NVIDIA gets proactively involved in. It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do they not have developer support; they actually play the victim because others take the initiative. For crying out loud, even Intel has game developer support/code. Correction: it turns out that AMD do actually have some open source libraries for game devs. The problem here isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA set out to optimize the game as best as they could for their hardware. AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by not getting involved. If I'm lazy and I get left behind that is my fault, not the fault of the other guy who did what I didn't do.

chronid 11y ago
Good luck optimizing for shader code you have no access to, because that is (was?) the situation, at least for some previous games that used it. Not even the developers of the games have any access to it. Gameworks actually prevents AMDs to optimize paths in their drivers. Exclusivity does not matter a bit. Note that AMD also has a program that help developers write shaders and optimize their engines to work better on AMD cards. But that does not prevent NVIDIA to see the code and optimize their own drivers accordingly. So, to me the problem here seems NVIDIA's attitude to sabotage (for no technical reason, except economics, see the physX on x86 debacle when they refused to compile code for something else that i386) performance on other platforms for their own gain. Like physX, Gameworks is already showing itself for what it is and will eventually fail and be forgotten. And people will believe that AMD is at fault for the next NVIDIA "magic technology" that brought no gain whatsoever to the gaming world.
fabian2k 11y ago
From what I read, AMD doesn't have access to the GameWorks source code. These features are also designed with the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs in mind, you can't really optimize around fundamental differences in the GPUs (e.g. the newest Nvidia cards are significantly better at tesselation).

jokoon 11y ago

Don't graphic drivers already optimize themselves for specific games ? I don't really know what's optimized underneath though...

pjc50 11y ago
From elsewhere in this thread, http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019 http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o... "Optimisation" may include "throw away the shaders provided by the game and replace them with entirely different ones written by NVIDIA for this specific game".

frik 11y ago

Witcher 3 had looked awesome on all press photos and in-game videos til last week. The finished game looks the same on all platforms, a highend PC runs on idle (30% Gpu). Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition (2011) has a pretty similar ggraphic. Assassins Creed Unity looks like a game from the future. Witcher 3 is a good game, but the PR wasn't that good. @down voter: do you mind to share your thoughts

smtddr 11y ago
I didn't downvote you.... but I bet others did because your comment doesn't speak to the debate covered in the article.
yAnonymous 11y ago
True. The game is great and still looks very good, but considerably worse than the previews. Especially the lighting and the over-saturated colors. The PR team did good though, because visually the game has the same issues as Watch Dogs, but it isn't getting anywhere as much hate for it.

bhouston 11y ago

This has always been the point of NVIDIA's propertary game engine technology for more than a decade now - give it away for free or very often for big titles integrate it into game engines using NVIDIA developers (who often come to work on site.) Then once the game is released mention that it works better/looks better on NVIDIA technology than on competitors (AMD/Intel) GPU technology. And of course blame it not working well on AMD/Intel on their "inferior" technology. NVIDIA must be loving this controversy as it was the whole game plan all along.

SloopJon 11y ago
I read something very similar in this anonymous Slashdot post when Assassin's Creed Unity came out: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=48382141 http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=483821... Choice quote: "Nvidia literally doesn't care if bouncing ten simple particles on your screen uses 30% of your GPU performance, so long as the same effect on an AMD GPU takes 80%. Nvidia is this dirty."
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rrss1122 11y ago
  The thing is, I have an nVidia card and ACU doesn't even run on it. It feels like they are not only trying to deter people from buying AMD, but that they are also trying to deter people from buying lower tier nVidia cards. I have to get ACU down to sub-720p resolution to even get more than 20fps. It's ridiculous.
  - mesozoic 11y ago
    I think the problem there is just that ACU was just a very poorly made game.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  >So Nvidia 'invented' TXAA- an horrifically bad AA method both in appearance and 'hit' on performance- but a method that runs far better on new Nvidia hardware than it does on new AMD hardware. Why is that, though? Why can't AMD do whatever Nvidia's doing to make it just as fast on their system?

superskierpat 11y ago

What about that mention of recent updates making 7xx series graphic cards performance worse? I have a 750 in my laptop and yesterday I booted pillars of eternity and was having much more performance problems than usual.

phn 11y ago

I hope the new low-level API kids on the block, like metal and vulkan, can switch the fight to actually compete in having solid GPU performance, and benefit consumers in the end. Then, maybe a GPU independent HairThing™/intermediate level toolkits can actually flourish.

tarpherder 11y ago
Why not just DX12?

bd 11y ago

HairWorks is not something to be particularly upset about. Vast majority of players, even on high-end GPUs just keep turning off those "premium" IHV-specific features as they are just so heavy. BTW AMD kinda started this with their TressFX hairs (notably used in new Tomb Raider). It had similar characteristics to HairWorks - extremely expensive feature for relatively small overall visual impact, better running on AMD than Nvidia GPUs, but still running pretty bad even on high-end GPUs. Something to keep in mind: those super-duper features you see at GPU launch events, they are mostly just marketing, "halo effect" features, not practical enough to be used in games for almost everybody. -------- We are speaking about miniscule fraction of all players who have GPUs powerful enough to runs all bells and whistles. Titan X, the only GPU that can run Witcher 3 fast with HairWorks enabled [1], exists in so small numbers that it doesn't even show up in Steam Hardware survey [2]. GTX 980, the next most powerful GPU, is owned by less than 0.5% of all people who use Steam. And GTX 980 runs 1080p ultra with HairWorks just ~37-40 fps. GTX 970, the next most powerful GPU, the most popular Maxwell GPU, huge bestseller, is owned by ~3% of Steam users. It's the only remaining GPU that can stay above 30 fps with HairWorks on. So something like 95+ percent of all gamers are not affected by this issue at all. -------- [1] http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html http://pclab.pl/art63116-27.html [2] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

sjwright 11y ago
> BTW AMD kinda started this The difference is AMD's TressFX source code is open, which allowed Nvidia to resolve the performance disparity without much fuss. Whereas the Nvidia's HairWorks source code is closed, leaving AMD unable to pitch in engineering resource for a diagnosis or solution.
- agapos 11y ago
  Also note the dates: Tomb Raider's TressFX happened in 2013 while Crysis 2 and the 'flat-surface tessellation' happened in 2011 (with Patch 1.8 I believe). Not something one can call a start.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Arzh 11y ago

I'd like to point out the Slightly Mad quotes about working with AMD. I have never heard of a developer having a good experience with AMD. Even Carmak, the man with probably the most klote for a game programmer, has had a hard time getting help from them. Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> Their support for developers has been why I've been choosing them for my PCs ever since I upgraded from my 9800 Pro. Don't you mean why you haven't been choosing them. Or are you choosing AMD because they (supposedly) aren't nice to developers?
VintageCool 11y ago
s/klote/clout/

jcastro 11y ago

It should be noted that hairworks crushes the entire game no matter what GPU you have (Nvidia or otherwise) except for one, the Titan X, which retails just north of a thousand dollars. Everyone else is pretty much forced to turn down some setting or another to hit 60+ fps. And that's just at 1080p! I thought my GTX970 would handle it no problem, but there are still tweaks to be made.

yAnonymous 11y ago

Nvidia technologies have been heavily used in both these games: * Watch Dogs * The Witcher 3 Both suffer from technical problems with the graphics, don't perform as good as they could (across all systems) and look considerably worse than in the previews. I like Nvidia cards and drivers, but as a developer I'd stay very clear of Nvidia-exclusive technologies. I guess the business guys must like the free advertising.

shmerl 11y ago

So what are they going to use on Linux? Supposedly Witcher 3 is being ported. Weirdly, HairWorks uses DirectCompute, which makes it unportable anywhere outside Windows. May be with emergence of Vulkan, developers won't need to use these vendor specific APIs, since they'll have low level enough access to implement their own physics logic efficiently on all GPUs.

snowballsteve 11y ago

I was getting stoked about the Witcher 3 when I got some free time. All this talk is making me think twice about the game and not about my AMD card.