Nvidia Gameswork Shenanigans, Ubisoft spin

[ExDreamer]

 

Users on Steam claim the PC version is poorly optimized and suffers from a wide range of problems, including poor frame rate, crashing, clipping, mouse lag on menus, freezing, poor rendering, and a general lack of graphics options.

Ubisoft has commented on the problems, noting that they seem to effect AMD users especially.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/12/ubisoft-comments-on-assassins-creed-unity-pc-troubles

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/946542-AMD-Graphics-Cards-Compatibility-with-Assassin-s-Creed-Unity?s=9f546ef91d1aca615e955dc09c8aa2f5

Something feel off here.

[Vrbas]

This is about libraries being changed in games. This has everything to do with the majority of the people who visit this site who are tech enthusiast.  The FPS difference in Watch Dogs was a matter of record and this game has the same problem. 

 

 

 

Nice avatar...and people call console gamers who fanboy a product "peasants"...Too funny. It appears PC gamers are just as pathetic with their backing/fanboying of a product. 

 

Oh and I guess you would be ok with AMD changing the entire library on "AMD titles"? Cus that will eventually happen. A better solution would be a lawsuit having to do with unfair practices and this crap stopping right now.

 

Bottom line? Nvidia is making a r9 290x into a GTX 680. AMD can do the same thing and turn a 980 into a 680. That is simply what you are supporting.

What are you going on about? AC Unity runs like complete shit on consoles as well. I'm bashing Ubisoft here, not consoles not AMD.  

 

Also nvidia didn't make a r9 290x into a GTX 680. Again that was Ubisoft. Ubisoft has already stated they meant 280x, do some research. nVidia has removed it. 

[decoy11]

Wow are you really blaming Nvidia for Ubisoft's incompetence? I mean do you seriously believe that Ubisoft is willing to kill a big franchise like Assassin's Creed and drive their company's name through the mud just so Nvidia can make AMD look inferior?

If anyone thinks Nvidia is seriously going to do this they might as well give up on PC gaming because Nvidia has their hand on the majority of games already so your complaints now are too late. Unreal Engine 3&4 uses PhysX and GameWorks. Unity3d ver 4 and 5 will also use PhysX. The only option left is CryEngine and inhouse developer engines and even a lot of them uses Nvidia tech.

[deathjester]

What are you going on about? AC Unity runs like complete shit on consoles as well. I'm bashing Ubisoft here, not consoles not AMD.  

 

Also nvidia didn't make a r9 290x into a GTX 680. Again that was Ubisoft. Ubisoft has already stated they meant 280x, do some research. nVidia has removed it. 

 

That has literally nothing to do with my OP. And yes they did. The FPS numbers speak for themselves. Nvidia has never "debunked this". They have only said you shouldn't need access to the game libraries to optimize it, which is pure insanity. Watch Dogs gap was never fully closed, because that is impossible.

 

The same division (Ubisoft Kiev) is handling the port of Farcry 4. How would it magically run better on AMD? Also CDPR has had to CLARIFY on their own forum that they are not using Games Works for the core of the game. WHY? Because when it is used on the core of the game, it will run like crap on everything, but much worse on AMD.

 

Other Nvidia games works titles that do NOT use the library for the core of the game run better on AMD (see my OP on Lords of the Fallen). So all the BS you see in this thread blaming AMD drivers is laughable. How does one games works game run better on AMD and one run far worse? Because one used the library for the core of the game. It is literally that simple. 

 

This library should simply never be used again for the core of a game by any dev. It is a bribe to screw over the competition and it has given Nvidia users NOTHING in the way of optimization.

[monstercameron]

I'll just add this http://www.anandtech.com/show/8714/benchmarked-lords-of-the-fallen

[deathjester]

a'll just add this http://www.anandtech.com/show/8714/benchmarked-lords-of-the-fallen

 

Game is running with Physx on. Of course it is going to be higher with it on...

 

This is like comparing a Tress FX test from Nvidia to AMD. At 1440p the only card there that can run 60 FPS (which you want in a game like that) is the GTX 980. No one is going to bother with that feature anyways. They are going to take a 1440p downsample/supersample or native over Physx unless they have the GTX 980.

 

In a havok game that shows no favoritism the AMD would beat the 980 (like Shadows of Mordor). I could care less about physx or tressfx or any of this crap. All fluff. The library at the core of the game is all I care about.

[hal9001]

@deathjester The steam hardware survey shows that 51.56% of Steam users have Nvidia GPUs, while only 29.32% have AMD ones.

 

What is the other 19.12% you might ask?

 

jk They are Intel HD Graphics

[deathjester]

@deathjester The steam hardware survey shows that 51.56% of Steam users have Nvidia GPUs, while only 29.32% have AMD ones.

 

What is the other 19.12% you might ask?

 

844091last2.jpg

jk They are Intel HD Graphics

 

Are you claiming that majority market share means this is acceptable? You people are really funny. Steam survey also says many people are on windows 8. Sweet FX doesn't even work on Win 8 with Nvidia. So I know that statistic isn't very accurate...BTW awesome optimization. Hope it is worth it for Nvidia. Game doesn't even run well on 2 GTX 980's on a hexa core at 1080p with MSAA.

 

 

Anyways enjoy Games Works library changes ruining games that should be easy ports since the consoles are now AMD x86 PC's with SEMI-custom AMD GPU's (hint there is no longer an excuse for a bad port and changing the library helps no one, including you), and I will enjoy Dragons Age Inquisition on my "crappy" R9 290 Tri-x at higher FPS than a GTX 980 at the same MSAA that can't be run on two GTX 980's in a games works special...

 

Just hope Nvidia doesn't ruin Witcher 3 for you (looks like they wont from the CDPR posts but we will see), and Batman (which ran perfectly smooth at Sony's E3 conference on PC). Watch Dogs looked really good at E3 to. A lot can change.

 

BTW I had a 3DFX card. That was back when Nvidia was complete garbage and ATI was a separate company from AMD and made cards mainly for Autocad... I laughed at Nvidia products back then. It has been interesting to see their rise and it involved a lot of shady crap which has people who worked on Steam OS saying they are referred to as the "video card mafia". Things can change. AMD CPU's were way ahead of Intel for gaming at one point as well, and now Intel is quite a bit ahead. You are looking at a small time frame in the history of computers and I am someone that will never purchase a Nvidia product again, when I have been on them since 3DFX before this last GPU purchase. Sorry, but I don't support BS and Nvidia is at an all time high.

 

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html

 

Basically to beat Nvidia, you have to employ the same tactics. The new CEO of AMD is a smart woman. Pretty sure she knows how to advertise, pay off bloggers/writers, astroturf and buy exclusive artificial performance increases...

 

If that happens? No one wins. 

[hal9001]

Are you claiming that majority market share means this is acceptable? You people are really funny. Steam survey also says many people are on windows 8. Sweet FX doesn't even work on Win 8 with Nvidia. So I know that statistic isn't very accurate...BTW awesome optimization. Hope it is worth it for Nvidia. Game doesn't even run well on 2 GTX 980's on a hexa core at 1080p with MSAA.

Anyways enjoy Games Works library changes ruining games that should be easy ports since the consoles are now AMD x86 PC's with SEMI-custom AMD GPU's (hint there is no longer an excuse for a bad port and changing the library helps no one, including you), and I will enjoy Dragons Age Inquisition on my "crappy" R9 290 Tri-x at higher FPS than a GTX 980 at the same MSAA that can't be run on two GTX 980's in a games works special...

Just hope Nvidia doesn't ruin Witcher 3 for you (looks like they wont from the CDPR posts but we will see), and Batman (which ran perfectly smooth at Sony's E3 conference on PC). Watch Dogs looked really good at E3 to. A lot can change.

BTW I had a 3DFX card. That was back when Nvidia was complete garbage and ATI was a separate company from AMD and made cards mainly for Autocad... I laughed at Nvidia products back then. It has been interesting to see their rise and it involved a lot of shady crap which has people who worked on Steam OS saying they are referred to as the "video card mafia". Things can change. AMD CPU's were way ahead of Intel for gaming at one point as well, and now Intel is quite a bit ahead. You are looking at a small time frame in the history of computers and I am someone that will never purchase a Nvidia product again, when I have been on them since 3DFX before this last GPU purchase. Sorry, but I don't support BS and Nvidia is at an all time high.

http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html

Basically to beat Nvidia, you have to employ the same tactics. The new CEO of AMD is a smart woman. Pretty sure she knows how to advertise, pay off bloggers/writers, astroturf and buy exclusive artificial performance increases...

If that happens? No one wins.

I wasn't attempting to challenge you. I was just putting some raw statistics out there for further analysis and interpretation. I don't like Ubisoft, especially its ways of interaction with the community and the falsified information that it distributes. TB's video was great. It's time that we "vote with our wallets" as many have said before on the forum. I'm only 14, so you were working with those 3dfx cards before I was born. It's weird to think about it like that. In conclusion, thank you for complimenting my sense of humor. (:

Edit: I don't understand the psychology behind many (including myself) that makes people believe that an Intel/Nvidia combination is always superior. Is it market share of advertising? Please elaborate.

[JJR10]

Sorry for the noob question...

 

It would seem one of the main assertions of the OP is that the games library was changed for AC Unity, so how do we know this was actually the case? Is this documented somewhere?

 

I find the whole topic intriguing and am trying to understand things better.

[deathjester]

Sorry for the noob question...

 

It would seem one of the main assertions of the OP is that the games library was changed for AC Unity, so how do we know this was actually the case? Is this documented somewhere?

 

I find the whole topic intriguing and am trying to understand things better.

 

Here ya go. Read a PR sales pitch article from Forbes, which comes to asinine conclusions pre AC Unity release disaster. I guess it isn't having GPU's 4 times stronger that can give us better AA, it is games works...

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2014/10/31/nvidia-gameworks-helps-push-pc-gaming-to-the-next-level/

 

"On the surface, that all sounds good. However, because NVIDIA keeps its GameWorks libraries closed, some folks have voiced serious concerns.  The closed nature of NVIDIA’s GameWorks libraries prevents competitors, mainly Intel and AMD, from fully optimizing their drivers for GameWorks-enabled titles. Without access to the code, to fully understand how GameWorks is doing things, optimization becomes vastly more difficult if not impossible. And because GameWorks code may supplant established DirectX implementations for certain effects, others are concerned it tips the scales too far in NVIDIA’s favor, and gives NVIDIA too much control, should a developer opt to use GameWorks.  These are valid concerns in an industry where the line between “optimizations” and “cheats” has a blurry history."

 

Pretty much everything after that is an Nvidia sales pitch.

 

Basically it is impossible to have performance gaps as big as the two Ubisoft games did this year. As CDPR says, you should have no optimization/performance difference unless you turn those features on. You get what the GPU can put out from DirectX. 

 

You can have a performance difference (not near as big) with Physx and Hairworks. The problem is, these Ubisoft games had a huge difference with none of that on. That is why CDPR went off on Ubisoft on their forum (I don't blame them), and specifically stated which GPU effects are GPU specific and they are all OPTIONAL. BTW Mass Effect Games used Physx on the CPU. I play those at 5.2 k resolution downsample in GedoSato with 4k texture packs....Not really hurting me. Add to that my Witcher 2 super sampled maxed runs like a dream and better than the GTX 970 videos I have seen posted on youtube.

 

TXAA? No one is going to use on a good card anyways in Witcher 3. Why would you ever want to blur the beautiful textures that CDPR makes. We will be using like 2xMSAA or 4x MSAA depending on how hard they push textures. Seeing it is CDPR, we will probably be at 2xMSAA on a single card cus they will really push it, and Witcher 2 textures are still insanely impressive. Physx and hairworks would be the only two features where the power of the GPU is not reflected in performance, and I often dropped physx on my GTX 770 to push a better AA/super sample depending on game. The Batman games are the only ones where Physx was really impressive to me.  Batman? We will see. I have seen no such clarification on everything being used for what. If it is like these Ubisoft games? AMD cards will struggle. Hairworks is SUPPOSED to just be Direct Compute if I remember right, so performance SHOULD look like this, as long as there are no shenanigans attached.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/directCompute.html

 

AMD could have made Mantle a complete joke and bypassed DirectX in favor of things the AMD cards did better. Instead they kept it fair and it was more about helping out their CPU's than screwing over Nvidia. Add to that all these games easily translate to DX 12 since they are so true to Direct X and Nvidia gamers will have ports to DX 12 from Mantle very soon after it releases.

 

That is why I think this is so bogus. AMD did something that will help Nvidia in the future and all gamers, gave Mantle to the Kronos group (which includes Nvidia, Intel and owns OpenGL) and this is being compared to something that is anticompetitive and bad for everyone and could send us down a slippery slope with huge swings on performance. I hope AMD doesn't retaliate, but if they do? Can you really blame them? If they are putting up money for a title, what stops them from doing the same crap?

 

Nvidia just needs to stop this. They make fantastic products, physx is enough to get people to buy a product. They have a good fanbase loyal to their products based on quality. They do not need to do all this dirty stuff.  You also have Samsung calling them out on stuff atm. Nvidia just needs to realize they can't keep doing this crap and expect people not to call them out on it. The gamers and techs are simply too smart now or too informed. This is not the early 2000's. I can stream my Tri-x killing it in a game and beating a GTX 970 at a high AA/downsample/supersample then have it miraculously be bad in a game where Games Works ruined it. I don't want a game like Dragon's Age or Battlefront to be bad on Nvidia cards. I want everyone to be able to play it awesome on the PC. 

 

This is where Nvidia went bat $@^# crazy with Games works and paying off devs. It was bad before this, but this is where it got REALLY bad, and we have seen no let up. Nvidia floods forums with "AMD sucks at drivers", which idiot fanboys repeat, even though you can have two games with an Nvidia on the front of it, like Shadows of Mordor and AC Unity and AMD can win at one at release day, and gets killed in the other day 1. Also AMD has been declined optimization from the studios like Rocksteady/Warner Bros so that claim by Nvidia is complete BS. This is all bribe money for artificial performance gains.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks-program-usurps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd

[Notional]

I don't have access to the internet on my pc, so I will make it short: none of this should come as a surprise to any experienced gamer. We already know that gameworks runs extremely poor on AMD hardware (I wonder why) we have known this from crysis 2 dx11, cod ghost and batman origins. Google gameworks usurps AMD and you will find an extremetech article proving this.

Several devs, including Johan from frostbyte engine team, people from Firaxis, and even ubisoft, have publically criticized gameworks for its blackboxed nature.

I don't mind middleware, when it moves the industry in the right directtion. This is however, very anti consumer and anti competitive.

[Mush Brain]

May the wars begin.

 

[Mush Brain]

I don't have access to the internet on my pc, so I will make it short: none of this should come as a surprise to any experienced gamer. We already know that gameworks runs extremely poor on AMD hardware (I wonder why) we have known this from crysis 2 dx11, cod ghost and batman origins. Google gameworks usurps AMD and you will find an extremetech article proving this.

Several devs, including Johan from frostbyte engine team, people from Firaxis, and even ubisoft, have publically criticized gameworks for its blackboxed nature.

I don't mind middleware, when it moves the industry in the right directtion. This is however, very anti consumer and anti competitive.

Crysis 2 just showed how weak Radeon 5K was, hardly any news there, the tesselation performance was garbage.

6xxx/7xxx series made huge improvements all around, even beating Nvidia in Crysis 2, game works has nothing to do with it.

 

Batman games use PhysX, and the game performs great on AMD hardware, PhysX is Nvidia tech.

[Notional]

Crysis 2 just showed how weak Radeon 5K was, hardly any news there, the tesselation performance was garbage.

6xxx/7xxx series made huge improvements all around, even beating Nvidia in Crysis 2, game works has nothing to do with it.

Batman games use PhysX, and the game performs great on AMD hardware, PhysX is Nvidia tech.

http://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing/2

read this an onwards.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks-program-usurps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd/2

same here. Sure it is not directly gameworks problems here, but both are nvidia influenced games, and both runs like shit on AMD. That does not just happen by accident.

A lot of the gameworks titles, run poorly on AMD, because neither AMD, nor the dev can optimize the code. In the second link on first page, you can see the update mentioning, that some devs can get licensing for the code to optimize, but they are NOT allowed to share this with AMD. A lot of optimization is done driverside, not ingame. That is why you often see betadrivers released with aaa games.

Now if a dev and AMD cannot collaborate on optimization, because the game uses black boxed middleware, what do you think will happen?