AMD accused of (and implicitly admits) preventing sponsored Games from supporting DLSS

[porina]

40 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Blaming the tool or the internet is just too easy, sometimes the hard truth is that you are just crap or the other person is better haha.

Why I don't play competitive shooters: my effective reaction time is measured in seconds  

 

34 minutes ago, AlTech said:

Only becuae Nvidia is artificially suppressing the latency numbers with Reflex.

If it reduces latency, what is artificial about it? AMD have their equivalent too. At the end of the day, if native rendering without reflex is considered ok for latency, then why not similar latency with refex+upscaling+frame generation? 

[AlTech]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

Why I don't play competitive shooters: my effective reaction time is measured in seconds  

 

If it reduces latency, what is artificial about it?

It forces the comparison to be Apples to Oranges instead of Apples to Apples.

 

6 minutes ago, porina said:

Why I don't play competitive shooters: my effective reaction time is measured in seconds  

 AMD have their equivalent too. At the end of the day, if native rendering without reflex is considered ok for latency, then why not similar latency with refex+upscaling+frame generation? 

Most people want more fps to eliminate latency. Increasing fps but maintaining input latency is kind of meaningless tbh.

[Stahlmann]

16 minutes ago, AlTech said:

It forces the comparison to be Apples to Oranges instead of Apples to Apples.

You could also argue the other way around. Why can't we compare both technologies when running with all their capabilities? Why do we have to handicap one to get a "fair" comparison? If the end result looks good why does it matter if a frame is real or generated?

 

16 minutes ago, AlTech said:

Most people want more fps to eliminate latency. Increasing fps but maintaining input latency is kind of meaningless tbh.

More FPS deals with 2 problems: Motion smoothness and latency. Just because latency isn't much better it still is a bit better and smoothness is a lot better. Sure, it's not advantageous in every scenario, but it's far from meaningless. Just because it doesn't feel better it still means it looks smoother.

 

Yes, it's not very useful at 200+ fps. Yes, it's not very useful at 20 fps. But if you're running a game at 75 fps for example this technology can comfortably boost the smoothness to 150 fps, which is obviously great when you're trying to fuel a 144Hz monitor.

 

Now add the fact that modern displays have lower and lower response times. That means that on OLED for example, even 40-60 fps can already look a bit choppy. Having a method to smooth that choppyness out without adding significant lag is a nice feature imo.

[porina]

4 minutes ago, AlTech said:

Most people want more fps to eliminate latency. Increasing fps but maintaining input latency is kind of meaningless tbh.

We're still in early days to see how this goes. In its current implementation, it is not a panacea to performance, but it is a tool that may be considered where appropriate. Someone earlier in this thread linked to rumours that AMD may be implementing more frames per interval in their version. If true, does it add value, or is it a marketing numbers game? 

 

This has given me an idea of how frame generation could be implemented without the mandatory delay of DLSS3. I'll put it in another thread but I'll need to draw some pretty pictures first.

 

 

[Ydfhlx]

I disagree with OP. In my opinion (and actually Hardware Unboxed agrees) they don't do this. And certainly, this quote does not confirm that in any way. AMD said their technology is the best, what else are they supposed to say?

 

It may simply be that since FSR2 is almost as good and runs on nvidia too, devs might see little point in implementing DLSS too. Being 'AMD sponsored' might be the final argument against DLSS, but I don't think they prevent anyone.

[RejZoR]

39 minutes ago, Ydfhlx said:

I disagree with OP. In my opinion (and actually Hardware Unboxed agrees) they don't do this. And certainly, this quote does not confirm that in any way. AMD said their technology is the best, what else are they supposed to say?

 

It may simply be that since FSR2 is almost as good and runs on nvidia too, devs might see little point in implementing DLSS too. Being 'AMD sponsored' might be the final argument against DLSS, but I don't think they prevent anyone.

Overwatch 2 for example only has FSR1 and FSR2. Why bother (as developer) with XeSS and DLSS when FSR2 just works on everything? FSR2 may not be as good as DLSS, but it's very close and just works on everything.

[KaitouX]

1 hour ago, Ydfhlx said:

AMD said their technology is the best, what else are they supposed to say?

The same as Nvidia? They could've just done the same as Nvidia and said:

Quote

NVIDIA does not and will not block, restrict, discourage, or hinder developers from implementing competitor technologies in any way. We provide the support and tools for all game developers to easily integrate DLSS if they choose and even created NVIDIA Streamline to make it easier for game developers to add competitive technologies to their games.

— Keita Iida, vice president of developer relations, NVIDIA

AMD comment ignored the actual question and have yet to publish anything actually denying that they are blocking DLSS and XeSS implementation on those games.

 

GN asked AMD about Starfield deal, the following was the exchange according to them:

Quote

Does the contract between AMD and Bethesda have any language which intentionally blocks or could be construed as blocking or limiting Bethesda's ability to integrate alternative upscaling technologies within Starfield?

- GamersNexus to AMD

and AMD responded:

Quote

We have no comment at this time.

- AMD to GamersNexus

Again they could have said something generic like "AMD does not and will not block or limit implementation of alternative upscaling technologies.", or if they can't mention the Bethesda contract they could just use "We have no comment at this time about the contract with Bethesda, but we never blocked alternative upscaling technologies." and it would have been all fine.

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Thaldor said:

I don't remember them doing this with game developers directly. But at the same time you never saw games with both PhysX and Havok support.

That was probably for a different reason though.

Adding a different physics engine is really difficult and requires a lot of work. As a result, developers willingly chose which one to support.

In this case however, adding support for DLSS when you already have support for FSR is fairly trivial, hence the reason why we see quite a few games with support for both.

 

I kind of doubt that Nvidia put it in their contracts that "if you use PhysX then you are not allowed to use Havok". 

 

Again, just to be 100% clear. What I am against is Company A telling Company B that they are not allowed to use a thing from Company C.

It's one thing if Company B willingly chooses to not use Company C's thing. It's another if they are forced to not use it because Company A said so.

 

 

3 hours ago, Thaldor said:

With PhysX Nvidia however did some really dirty stuff and they didn't even hide it. Like disabling dedicated PhysX support if non-Nvidia GPU was detected and stating:

That was a shitty thing for Nvidia to do, but not the same as what is being discussed in this thread.

Again, the issue I have is that one company tells another company to not use a thing from a third company.

 

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

That may be what matters but it's highly doubtful it's in any written contract and formal obligation. People seem to think XYZ company's are legal fools, I don't think multibillion dollars companies are fools personally. They play the grey area.

I mean, companies have been caught doing illegal and anticompetitive things in the past. I don't think "their lawyers are smart" is a valid argument for why they aren't doing anything illegal. I also think it is possible to do something morally wrong without it being illegal. The question is if AMD is doing these things or not.

I find their deflection of the question worrying because I don't really see any reason why they wouldn't deny it if it wasn't true.

[Stahlmann]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Overwatch 2 for example only has FSR1 and FSR2. Why bother (as developer) with XeSS and DLSS when FSR2 just works on everything? FSR2 may not be as good as DLSS, but it's very close and just works on everything.

Regular DLSS upscaling might not offer that much over FSR2, but omitting DLSS 3 frame generation leaves out a significant feature and advantage over FSR. I repeated myself enough already in this thread on why leaving out DLSS 3 is a bigger deal than DLSS 2 and that AMD has a big incentive to do so. And in specific latency sensitive games like Overwatch it might not be a big deal because it won't be used my most people anyway.

 

That doesn't change the fact that secretly blocking your competition with exclusive contracts is just a scummy thing to do. And this is the main problem people have. Not necessarily that FSR is worse than DLSS.

[RejZoR]

20 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Regular DLSS upscaling might not offer that much over FSR2, but omitting DLSS 3 frame generation leaves out a significant feature and advantage over FSR. I repeated myself enough already in this thread on why leaving out DLSS 3 is a bigger deal than DLSS 2 and that AMD has a big incentive to do so. And in specific latency sensitive games like Overwatch it might not be a big deal because it won't be used my most people anyway.

 

That doesn't change the fact that secretly blocking your competition with exclusive contracts is just a scummy thing to do. And this is the main problem people have. Not necessarily that FSR is worse than DLSS.

That's a wrong assumption. Overwatch as game played by the masses will be played on all sorts of low end systems where any upscaling can help gain playable framerates on crap graphic cards. Not being limited to RTX only means it might run on some older Radeon or GeForce card to get acceptable framerate.

[WereCat]

12 hours ago, starsmine said:

To FSR 1.0 yes... But DLSS 2.0 is also vastly superior to DLSS 1.0 as well. 

Its a hair better than FSR 2.0, but not enough to split hairs over given the fact they ALL inherently look worse than native. If you cared about how much it looks you would not be using any of them. IMO its not worth the investment to put in DLSS AND FSR when DLSS only works with Nvidia and FSR works with nvidia, intel and AMD. 

DLSS arguably often times look better than native which FSR just cant achieve.

Main reason for that is DLAA, most games simply lack any good AA solution and DLSS solves that which is not case for FSR as that usually makes the AA issue even worse by making the AA elements shimmer even more.

 

Now there is a question of FSR vs DLSS overall visual quality... which varies from game to game and I really don't care at FSR/DLSS Quality preset at 1440p and higher but for lower resolution the DLSS just looks better almost always. And I am not saying that DLSS always look better than native. For example I don't like how blury DLSS looks in Witcher 3 and I preffer the FSR 2 visuals in that particular game.

 

Yes, FSR works on all card basically which is nice but it's also nice to have options. And don't forget about XeSS.

 

All that said, while I agree this is an issue, I don't understand why people hate on this so much. This has been literally happening for years with other GPU exclusive features. TressFX vs Hairworks, PhysX, tesselation, etc...

Remember when some NVIDIA sponsored games intentinally hidden tesselated geometry outside of cemera view to tank the AMD performance?

[KaitouX]

14 minutes ago, WereCat said:

All that said, while I agree this is an issue, I don't understand why people hate on this so much. This has been literally happening for years with other GPU exclusive features. TressFX vs Hairworks, PhysX, tesselation, etc...

People hated those exclusive features too, but in this case it's worse because many games actually support more than one of DLSS, FSR and XeSS, which wasn't a thing for most of the features you mentioned. And they're also reasonably easy to implement.

[WereCat]

5 minutes ago, KaitouX said:

People hated those exclusive features too, but in this case it's worse because many games actually support more than one of DLSS, FSR and XeSS, which wasn't a thing for most of the features you mentioned. And they're also reasonably easy to implement.

I think the reason for hate is vastly different this time around. I believe that most people are angry for the lack of choice because using upscaling is more or less a necessity rather than an option for improved performance which makes one or the other more important to people depending on which card they have.

I think the hate should be concentrated towards devs/studios/publishers for releasing a hot mess instead of playable games because slapping DLSS/FSR/XeSS on a stuttery mess these days = optimisation.

 

Also, can't help but laugh that most of these FSR only titles only use FSR 1.0 which may as well not exist as it looks terribly in 90% of games.

[divito]

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I am not surprised, but I am disappointed, that this forum seems to side with AMD when they are doing something blatently anti-competetive.

 

Paying a company to not use something from your competitor, is never okay. If these allegations are true, and even if FSR is really close in terms of DLSS performance, it's still not okay to pay money to a company to have them ignore your competitors product.

Exclusivity is not anti-competitive, except in specific circumstances. AMD's market share completely negates any anti-competitive aspect to this.

This logic is also horrendous. So many companies would be at risk of public haranguing if their contractual dealings were more public, and showcase how exclusivity and services actually work in the business world.

 

Sony and Microsoft would be in the news constantly for preventing developers from releasing on multiple platforms.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I mean, companies have been caught doing illegal and anticompetitive things in the past. I don't think "their lawyers are smart" is a valid argument for why they aren't doing anything illegal. I also think it is possible to do something morally wrong without it being illegal. The question is if AMD is doing these things or not.

I find their deflection of the question worrying because I don't really see any reason why they wouldn't deny it if it wasn't true.

Well sure but odds are most company activities are not illegal, it's not really like "if we do this and sell this drug we'll make 2.5 billion a year" like you see in Pharma all the time heh. And even then most of the time Pharma companies aren't doing illegal things despite that industry's horrendous reputation.

 

People way over play how bad both companies are and what they are doing. There is nothing morally wrong with a GPU vendor partnering with a game studio for a game to help implement new technologies, nothing at all. There is however a problem if a GPU vendor creates a broad sweeping development tools set, works with a major game engine developer and makes all their technology integral to the foundation of game development that extends across the industry and even that is not "illegal" but does become a moral issue if the other competing GPU vendor does not get to do the same or is adversely effected because they are only 1/4 the market size and not deemed worth bothering.

 

That's why I say they play the grey areas, they certainly are not stupid enough to intentionally put themselves in to legal trouble over so little.

[Brooksie359]

14 hours ago, da na said:

Saying "Hey, don't implement our competitor's technology, use ours instead" sounds pretty damn anticompetitive, whether or not FSR works on all cards

I mean not really. Again FSR works on both so the only thing they are doing is stopping their money going to a proprietary technology that only helps the competitions cards and instead having them implement a method that can be used by both gpus. The fact that FSR is open source is super pro competition making people not locked down to one brand for technology. If you think AMD not wanting to support DLSS is anticompetitive then I am not sure what to say other than you know nvidia would probably require dlss on nvidia titles and would actually give a competitive advantage to nvidia cards. 

[RejZoR]

45 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I mean not really. Again FSR works on both so the only thing they are doing is stopping their money going to a proprietary technology that only helps the competitions cards and instead having them implement a method that can be used by both gpus. The fact that FSR is open source is super pro competition making people not locked down to one brand for technology. If you think AMD not wanting to support DLSS is anticompetitive then I am not sure what to say other than you know nvidia would probably require dlss on nvidia titles and would actually give a competitive advantage to nvidia cards. 

Main issue with the "we're the good guys" approach of open standards is that NVIDIA the has advantage again because customers of their products can use FSR and DLSS where AMD users can only use FSR. Same issue with FreeSync. NVIDIA users can use G-Sync and FreeSync where AMD users can only use FreeSync. As much as I hate NVIDIA for al ltheir BS through years, but I'd be more inclined towards NVIDIA than AMD because of this. Like, for example new game Trepang2 which only supports DLSS (so far). If I had Radeon, I'd be forced to run it at native 1440p resolution which on Epic settings does make a noticeable performance hit even on RTX 3080. But flipping DLSS on and it was butter smooth experience and I honestly can't tell a difference in image quality.

 

However, FSR has advantage. Since it runs on all hardware, be it AMD, Intel or AMD, developers can opt to only implement FSR in their game.

[IkeaGnome]

3 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

That doesn't change the fact that secretly blocking your competition with exclusive contracts is just a scummy thing to do. And this is the main problem people have. Not necessarily that FSR is worse than DLSS.

Are we also going to go after Microsoft and Sony for this? 

 

Edit: Hadn't read far enough to see that @divito had already brought this up.

[Brooksie359]

51 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Main issue with the "we're the good guys" approach of open standards is that NVIDIA the has advantage again because customers of their products can use FSR and DLSS where AMD users can only use FSR. Same issue with FreeSync. NVIDIA users can use G-Sync and FreeSync where AMD users can only use FreeSync. As much as I hate NVIDIA for al ltheir BS through years, but I'd be more inclined towards NVIDIA than AMD because of this. Like, for example new game Trepang2 which only supports DLSS (so far). If I had Radeon, I'd be forced to run it at native 1440p resolution which on Epic settings does make a noticeable performance hit even on RTX 3080. But flipping DLSS on and it was butter smooth experience and I honestly can't tell a difference in image quality.

 

However, FSR has advantage. Since it runs on all hardware, be it AMD, Intel or AMD, developers can opt to only implement FSR in their game.

I think now that amd has mostly won the monitor standards war I think this might be the same thing. It would be most beneficial if FSR ends up being implemented on games rather than dlss because everyone can use FSR so I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happens and that would be ideal. So I would say at this point for monitors AMD vs nvidia isn't really an issue anymore and it might the the same with FSR. 

[RejZoR]

33 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I think now that amd has mostly won the monitor standards war I think this might be the same thing. It would be most beneficial if FSR ends up being implemented on games rather than dlss because everyone can use FSR so I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happens and that would be ideal. So I would say at this point for monitors AMD vs nvidia isn't really an issue anymore and it might the the same with FSR. 

Thing is, while FSR2 is pretty good now, DLSS is still slightly better and if I have option to pick both, I'll use DLSS on my GeForce. If not, I'll use FSR if needed.

[ravenshrike]

13 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I am not surprised, but I am disappointed, that this forum seems to side with AMD when they are doing something blatently anti-competetive.

 

This is no different than nVidia has done many times in the past. Is it ideal? No. Is it surprising? Also no. In any case it's a win for anyone on console, with an AMD card, or with a lower end/older nVidia cards since it means no time or money is spent optimizing for DLSS and the publisher gets more money to work on the game. 

[MarvinKMooney]

If this is true, why is it that AMD is bad for offering money/sponsorship or whatever they are giving to the developers when it's the developers who agreed to it/went along with it.

[Arika]

Nvidia: *releases a new GPU*

"fuck nvidia, they don't care about consumers any more"

AMD: *for some inexplicable reason, aren't denying that they are actively being anti-competition*

"oh, but...."

 

 

I think i've finally lost all hope in this forum ever being unbiased. i will admit it was hanging by a thread for a while.

 

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, Arika S said:

Nvidia: *releases a new GPU*

"fuck nvidia, they don't care about consumers any more"

AMD: *for some inexplicable reason, aren't denying that they are actively being anti-competition*

"oh, but...."

 

 

I think i've finally lost all hope in this forum ever being unbiased. i will admit it was hanging by a thread for a while.

 

How is supporting FSR over dlss on games they helped fund is now somehow anticompetitive? Both cards can make use of the tech. They aren't giving the competition advantage which is much different than doing something to make sure you have a competitive advantage over the other company. Why would AMD allow a game they help fund to support a proprietary technology that only works on Nvidia cards rather than FSR that is open source and all of the gpus can actually use it. 

[Brooksie359]

11 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Thing is, while FSR2 is pretty good now, DLSS is still slightly better and if I have option to pick both, I'll use DLSS on my GeForce. If not, I'll use FSR if needed.

So was gsync but I don't think DLSS is good for the ecosystem personally vs FSR which because it's open sources it can work on any card. I think eventually we will see that while dlss might be better than FSR it might not matter because games will likely implement FSR simply because it's one and you have supported all gpus vs with dlss you are basically only allowing support a few generations of nvidia gpus.