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

[Larunda]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/

 

"I asked AMD's chief gaming scientist Richard Huddy, a vocal critic of Nvidia's GameWorks technology, about AMD's involvement with CD Projekt Red, and the support it had reportedly failed to provide to the developer: "That's an unfortunate view, but that doesn't follow from what we're seeing," said Huddy. "We've been working with CD Projeckt Red from the beginning. We've been giving them detailed feedback all the way through. Around two months before release, or thereabouts, the GameWorks code arrived with HairWorks, and it completely sabotaged our performance as far as we're concerned. We were running well before that...it's wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.""

Edited May 21, 2015 by Whiskers
Fixed for night theme users

[TheMidnightNarwhal]

[mr moose]

Of course he said that, he doesn't know how to open his mouth without blaming, criticizing or otherwise simply being derisory to NVidia. 

[wyattzx]

I suppose that might have to do with the current marketshare NVIDIA has on AMD. 

[1Scotty1]

[szomeret]

It's been said before. The best thing to do is disable tessellation and then see what the performance differential is. Tessellation is dependent one fixed-function unit. AMD does need to catch up to Nvidia with their tessellator but if AMD wants to mitigate the issue for older architectures, they or CD Projekt could do some tweaks or tessellate parts of it ahead of time.

In 5 years AMD will be dead. We'll all have to use Nvidia cards and pay $500 minimum.

[Humbug]

Well Richard Huddy is not a neutral party.

But what adds weight to his claim is the statement below from CD Projekt
"Many of you have asked us if AMD Radeon GPUs would be able to run NVIDIA’s HairWorks technology – the answer is yes! However, unsatisfactory performance may be experienced as the code of this feature cannot be optimized for AMD products."

[SuperPug]

Runs fine on my 280X with hairworks disabled. So whatever...

[Trik'Stari]

Isn't a statement like that bordering on libel? Just a thought.

[mr moose]

Well Richard Huddy is not a neutral party.

But what adds weight to his claim is the statement below from CD Projekt

"Many of you have asked us if AMD Radeon GPUs would be able to run NVIDIA’s HairWorks technology – the answer is yes! However, unsatisfactory performance may be experienced as the code of this feature cannot be optimized for AMD products."

 

But what if the reason the code can't be optimised is becasue of AMD drivers and not because of hairworks?  Not saying it is, but if AMD are confident they can fix the issue with drivers then why couldn't CDPR fix it with code?

 

 

Isn't a statement like that bordering on libel? Just a thought.

 

They'd have to prove damage resulted from the claim, I doubt they can satisfactorily do that. 

 

Although I wish they would take it to court, then the developers would be under oath to tell the truth about it all.

[pbenologa]

But what if the reason the code can't be optimised is becasue of AMD drivers and not because of hairworks?  Not saying it is, but if AMD are confident they can fix the issue with drivers then why couldn't CDPR fix it with code?

 

 

 

They'd have to prove damage resulted from the claim, I doubt they can satisfactorily do that. 

 

Although I wish they would take it to court, then the developers would be under oath to tell the truth about it all.

The drivers are the optimization fix. If you cant directly optimized the code for AMD product, that simply means nvidia locked out the code only to be used by their own hardware. Also amd gave a quick fix for hairworks by lowering the tessellation multiplier. 

[That Norwegian Guy]

Can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuit inevitably on the horizon, just need that one first step from someone with facts.

GameWorks was conceived, designed and delivered with one goal in mind: sabotage.

 

For now, even if I do use an Nvidia card, I'm not touching anything with GameWorks in it.

[Humbug]

But what if the reason the code can't be optimised is becasue of AMD drivers and not because of hairworks? Not saying it is, but if AMD are confident they can fix the issue with drivers then why couldn't CDPR fix it with code?

I hope it's a driver fix.

The only thing I am worried about is that users have been able to get good performance and good image quality by turning down tessellation to 8x in catalyst control panel. If it was that easy to fix why didn't the dev do it themselves? This would have benefitted everybody including Maxwell users. I would like to know if the licensing terms on hairworks prevented them from turning it down a bit to a more optimal level or at least providing an ingame slider. But obviously the NDA means that I will never know.

[Bouzoo]

[deviant88]

But he is right thats exactly what happened,even my nvidia gpu runs bad,ruined game. Any gamer with half working brain should boycott nvidia's gameworks, even if it wont have much effect anyway.

Any game with gameworks has been pretty much ruined.

[Samfisher]

But he is right thats exactly what happened,even my nvidia gpu runs bad,ruined game. Any gamer with half working brain should boycott nvidia's gameworks, even if it wont have much effect anyway.

Any game with gameworks has been pretty much ruined.

Witcher 3 is ruined cos you don't have HairWorks?  Lol ok.

[mr moose]

The drivers are the optimization fix. If you cant directly optimized the code for AMD product, that simply means nvidia locked out the code only to be used by their own hardware. Also amd gave a quick fix for hairworks by lowering the tessellation multiplier. 

 

An issue between AMD hardware and Nvidia software does not automatically make it an intentional action on nvidia's part, it could simply be a driver/hardware issue on AMD's.

 

Or it could simply be the nature of the beast, as Nvidia wants to provide the best experience they can for their hardware which might come at a cost to on AMD hardware simply due to the fact it is different.  There is still no evidence this is intentional.    Kudos to AMD if they can fix it with drivers, because either way it doesn't sound like an easy task.

[Trik'Stari]

But what if the reason the code can't be optimised is becasue of AMD drivers and not because of hairworks?  Not saying it is, but if AMD are confident they can fix the issue with drivers then why couldn't CDPR fix it with code?

 

 

 

They'd have to prove damage resulted from the claim, I doubt they can satisfactorily do that. 

 

Although I wish they would take it to court, then the developers would be under oath to tell the truth about it all.

That would be nice to see. I may not know much about drivers and programming and such, but I know enough to know that a statement like "hairworks cannot be optimized for AMD cards" is complete bullsh*t. They just haven't done anything to optimize it.

 

Well Richard Huddy is not a neutral party.

But what adds weight to his claim is the statement below from CD Projekt

"Many of you have asked us if AMD Radeon GPUs would be able to run NVIDIA’s HairWorks technology – the answer is yes! However, unsatisfactory performance may be experienced as the code of this feature cannot be optimized for AMD products."

 

That's a complete BS statement^ Only thing preventing it has to be Nvidia.

[Ostwind]

I still fail to see how the game is "ruined" because of hairworks. Here's an idea, just turn it off.

[Anarchyz11]

Why is a setting that runs like shit on both cards, that can be turned off, such a big deal to everyone. 

[LAwLz]

We were running well before that...it's wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.

 

 

I don't know about you Dick, but I think it is more likely that your cards are just behind in terms of tessellation performance. You know tessellation, the thing you have been way behind at for about 5 years now (ever since the 5000 vs 400 series days). The thing you were heavily criticized for and promised a quadrupling of when going from 5000 to 6000 series because the performance was so abysmal.

You know the thing you "fixed" in drivers by simply setting a limit on how much tessellation can be going on at any time.

If you spent less time criticizing Nvidia and more time fixing that we might not have needed this debate.

 

Anyway since you can toggle it on/off it doesn't affect performance. Just turn HairWorks off and you should get the same well optimized performance he claims they had before HairWorks was put in.

[mr moose]

Why is a setting that runs like shit on both cards, that can be turned off, such a big deal to everyone. 

 

Because some people need someone to blame,  while others want the feature on but are getting annoyed because it seems it's too hard to make it work properly without running around blaming everyone else.

[simson0606]

wasn't there the same issue the other way around with tressfx (the hair in tomb raider)

[Marlon]

Ideally, neither AMD or Nvidia should be producing technologies which perform proprietary graphics calculations / algorithms. The case for AMD doing it is somewhat better due to them open sourcing all their innovations - however it probably still shouldn't be thing.

 

Hardware manufactures should just build hardware, and the drivers which implement specific APIs - the fact that GPU makers have to release and optimise drivers for specific applications is just a broken situation in itself -hopefully DX12 and Vulkan will help with this, but I'm not particularly hopeful.

 

If Gameworks was a product of a 3rd party, that 3rd party could make sure their algorithms work well on all GPU venders, perhaps switching rendering technologies depending on the hardware available - e.g. Cuda vs OpenCL

 

Intel got a *huge* fine (though it was still far less than the amount they profited by) for making their x86 c++ compiler mute performance on AMD chips, and I am finding it difficult to find a difference between that and what Gameworks does.

 

TressFX is open source, and runs well (ish) on both hardware platforms, granted it probably doesn't do everything HairWorks probably does, but being open source Nvidia could of easily contributed to the project, benefiting the industry as a whole.

[Ostwind]

I would like some of the people with AMD hardware to try this, I'm running Nvidia hardware so I cannot confirm if it works or not. Yes it's WCCF but how about you save the hate comments and just give the method a spin? http://wccftech.com/witcher-3-run-hairworks-amd-gpus-crippling-performance/