NVIDIA Under Attack Again for GameWorks in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

[iMikeTheKing]

After 53+ pages, are you guys not tired of arguing about this?

[Guest Kloaked]

After 53+ pages, are you guys not tired of arguing about this?

 

Tears keep me going. So nah.

[Briggsy]

After 53+ pages, are you guys not tired of arguing about this?

 

Weird, I'm on page 11. 

[Shakaza]

Weird, I'm on page 11. 

Have you not seen the Project CARS thread? It's 43 pages.

[Briggsy]

Have you not seen the Project CARS thread? It's 43 pages.

 

Meh, the witcher is more interesting.

[Shakaza]

Meh, the witcher is more interesting.

It's essentially the same arguments over the same issue, except it's a different game.

 

But, yes, I agree.

[TroubleKlef]

Well it is Nvidia. The way the game is meant to be played.

[Briggsy]

It's essentially the same arguments over the same issue, except it's a different game.

 

But, yes, I agree.

 

lol true enough.

 

In some ways this describes roughly 99% of LTT forum posts.

[Shakaza]

Well it is Nvidia. The way the game is meant to be played.

I'm gonna play games just how I darn well please, thank you very much.

 

Hmph.

 

[PlayModeOn]

So they're surprised an Nvidia Tech doesnt work with AMD cards...

Logic game to Strong.

 

inb4 this thread turns out like every other thread mentioning gameworks...

Edit: Called it.

 

So Nvidia technology for Nvidia GPU's can't be optimized for AMD GPU's and we apparently have a problem with this? What was everyone expecting? Imagine that, a company that makes GPU's made an exclusive technology only for their GPU's... How dare they?

Its not just that. The fact that it is an Nvidia-sponsored game makes it more controversial. I never seen a game in recent times that is sponsored by both Nvidia and AMD since Battlefield 3, that's the only game I know that has both AMD and Nvidia logos on their CD box and runs well on both vendors without some proprietary software from either side. 

[Opcode]

why the fuck is Nvidia under attack for this? just because AMD is too lazy to make fancy hair posible on their GPUs?

Maybe you're forgetting about TressFX.

 

.....why doesn't AMD just come up with their own equivalent of gameworks?

 

Or was that essentially what Mantle was?

They have, TressFX actually came out before GameWorks and Nvidia pretty much copied it so they can provide the same features. Although AMD has the upper hand in this department because not only is TressFX written better it also works the same across all hardware. Wait until the new Deus Ex Universe comes out which uses TressFX and watch how many complaints we'll have about Nvidia users being limited or suffering performance issues (none). Nivida is just a joke of a company as of late and they seem to just keep digging. I find the snarky remarks of praise that people make to how good Nvidia is, humorous.

[Victorious Secret]

It's essentially the same arguments over the same issue, except it's a different game.

 

But, yes, I agree.

 

 

 

Tears keep me going. So nah.

 

The important thing is that I basically have a monopoly on the tears of fanboys. 

If you know what I mean  

[Guest Kloaked]

Maybe you're forgetting about TressFX.

 

They have, TressFX actually came out before GameWorks and Nvidia pretty much copied it so they can provide the same features. Although AMD has the upper hand in this department because not only is TressFX written better it also works the same across all hardware. Wait until the new Deus Ex Universe comes out which uses TressFX and watch how many complaints we'll have about Nvidia users being limited or suffering performance issues (none). Nivida is just a joke of a company as of late and they seem to just keep digging. I find the snarky remarks of praise that people make to how good Nvidia is humorous.

 

You have bullshit written all over your post.

 

I love how you guys try to spin the facts into your fantasy truth.

[Opcode]

You have bullshit written all over your post.

 

I love how you guys try to spin the facts into your fantasy truth.

Maybe you can debunk them other than taking offense to the facts and shouting "omgerd bullshart". AMD is known for not having the best software suites although TressFX is an exception to that. We've seen in the past with the very early versions of how it runs flawlessly on both brands of hardware. Albeit Tomb Raider needed a patch to fix glitching on Nvidia cards as soon as it came everything was butter smooth for everyone. No upper hands, no specific optimizations that made any great deal of difference. Nvidia can just take their GameWorks stack and shove it because it's really a pile of shit being locked down in the gaming industry (which is ruled by AMD).

[Paranoid Kami]

Buy a flagship card from Nvidia and it only lasts a single year because they only support their newest line... Way to gimp your own cards  :lol:

[Guest Kloaked]

Maybe you can debunk them other than taking offense to the facts and shouting "omgerd bullshart". AMD is known for not having the best software suites although TressFX is an exception to that. We've seen in the past with the very early versions of how it runs flawlessly on both brands of hardware. Albeit Tomb Raider needed a patch to fix glitching on Nvidia cards as soon as it came everything was butter smooth for everyone. No upper hands, no specific optimizations that made any great deal of difference. Nvidia can just take their GameWorks stack and shove it because it's really a pile of shit being locked down in the gaming industry (which is ruled by AMD).

 

Kk. Even though we already talked about some of this with your video comparison; Lets start with the first quoted post here.

 

"..TressFX is an exception to that." // In it's early form, it looks bad. It looked bad in Tomb Raider no matter how much you want to paint subjectivity on it - it objectively looks bad. If it looks good on Deus Ex, more power to them.

 

"Nvidia can just take their GameWorks stack and shove it because it's really a pile of shit being locked down in the gaming industry (which is ruled by AMD)." // It's not a pile of shit. It's pushing the visuals in gaming forward as much as you guys bitch about it not being able to run on Radeon hardware. AMD rules the gaming industry? According to what? Richard Huddy? Robert Hallock? Please. The people who rule the gaming industry are the ones making and buying the fucking games.

 

 

Maybe you're forgetting about TressFX.

 

They have, TressFX actually came out before GameWorks and Nvidia pretty much copied it so they can provide the same features. Although AMD has the upper hand in this department because not only is TressFX written better it also works the same across all hardware. Wait until the new Deus Ex Universe comes out which uses TressFX and watch how many complaints we'll have about Nvidia users being limited or suffering performance issues (none). Nivida is just a joke of a company as of late and they seem to just keep digging. I find the snarky remarks of praise that people make to how good Nvidia is, humorous.

 

Nvidia saw an idea and made their own with it, not that it wasn't already done in some form. They essentially morphed PhysX into the HairWorks tool. PhysX was already used once before to simulate cloth, such as in Mirror's Edge - common sense would tell you it wouldn't be hard to use it for hair. It objectively looks better than TressFX as it sits. We already talked about that and for some reason you think TressFX looks better than HairWorks and I cannot for the life of me see why. It's not something subjective, TressFX objectively looks out of place in the games it's been used in and essentially looks like an anime hair mod for Skyrim, minus the physics of it.

 

Have you personally seen the source code for TressFX? How do you know it's written better?

 

There won't be complaints about TressFX from me when I play Deus Ex because if it looks bad or if it runs bad, I'm not using it because that's what any normal person would do.

 

AMD is the real joke of a company here since I can actually come up with a coherent statement as to why that is: their CPU's suck, their Radeon cards are falling behind (don't you fucking bring up HBM and the 300 series - those aren't out yet so don't even start).

[EChondo]

It's absolutely hilarious that people in this thread are saying that Nvidia is not at fault and that the game devs are. They are both at fault and this has been going on for nearly a year and a half now.

 

Nvidia fights dirty and has a very nasty track record. Anyone remember the Origin PC scandal? How about PhysX being on the PS4, which is entirely AMD hardware? Also I'm pretty sure when Nvidia offered AMD PhysX; AMD was required to give Nvidia their GPU designs and their drivers would be written by them as well.

 

Nvidia "Gameworks" is absolutely horrible and we saw this coming a mile away back in 2013 on this very forum: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/93564-how-nvidias-gameworks-program-will-affect-gaming/

[Notional]

Kk. Even though we already talked about some of this with your video comparison; Lets start with the first quoted post here.

 

"..TressFX is an exception to that." // In it's early form, it looks bad. It looked bad in Tomb Raider no matter how much you want to paint subjectivity on it - it objectively looks bad. If it looks good on Deus Ex, more power to them.

 

"Nvidia can just take their GameWorks stack and shove it because it's really a pile of shit being locked down in the gaming industry (which is ruled by AMD)." // It's not a pile of shit. It's pushing the visuals in gaming forward as much as you guys bitch about it not being able to run on Radeon hardware. AMD rules the gaming industry? According to what? Richard Huddy? Robert Hallock? Please. The people who rule the gaming industry are the ones making and buying the fucking games.

 

No matter what, it's your subjective opinion. Many people like TressFX, and thinks it looks good, so there is absolutely no objectivity about your statement. I thought Lara Croft got more personality out of it, instead of the normal mesh hair, characters have.

Speaking of mesh hair; maybe TressFx didn't have gravity control, but neither does mesh hair or any other type of hair. I have seen no proof, that HairWorks have gravity functions either, so criticizing it for that, seems quite hollow.

 

According to dominance in the gaming industry. AMD has 100% of the consoles. XBONE and PS4, both CPU and GPU, and WIIU, the GPU. We also know that next gen of Nintendo will be AMD too. If we see PS5 and XBTWO in 2017, I doubt it will be anything other than AMD there too.

 

It is because of this, that NVidia feels threatened (and with good reason). 14nm APU's with high end graphics, is a disruptive technology, that via asymmetry of motivation, will eat away at NVidia's markets, from the bottom up. Thus cornering NVidia, to only do expensive high end stuff, where AMD is also competitive. No wonder NVidia is pulling BS proprietary tech, left and right, trying to trap consumers in vendor lock in, and sabotaging gaming experiences for AMD consumers. It's pathetic and desperate.

[Zulkkis]

 

Why does it hurt the community as a whole? That sounds more like your personal projection, rathar than the voice of the community. If gameworks means better visuals in games, I hardly think anyone would be against that. The problem that it doesn't run well on AMD graphics cards, is yet to be blamed on nvidia in a constructive manner. I'm personally more looking at the developers for not making the gameworks software and their own engine mutually exclusive, and/or AMD for not wanting to pitch in. I feel like AMD is burning too many bridges, and we somehow have to feel sorry for them. 

 

I agree that it's annoying people saying "i own GTX, therefor i don't care". But don't take those people as an example when you're comdeming this whole forum. But to be honest, I think people just say that to get a rise out of people (like you).

 

What is going on behind the scenes is something quite a bit else.

• GameWorks features use methods that are not necessary to achieve higher graphical fidelity, but are still done that way because the performance hit is higher on AMD cars (i.e far more tessellation than what is actually needed). Even before Gameworks had the name, Crysis 2 had very weird tessellation behavior.
• AMD cannot modify the GameWorks component in a way where it would be optimized for their hardware. It is a black box, the license forbids all modifications without consulting nVidia and developers cannot share this code to AMD.
• TressFX is an example of a solution that nVidia could look at an optimize it for their hardware, and now it runs just as well on nVidia hardware as it does on AMD. I'm not saying it was perfect, nVidia probably didn't have the access to the code early enough for Tomb Raider, but all things considered the end result won't affect anyone today. Meanwhile, GameWorks has been going on for quite a while now, and they won't be opening it up, at all.

I think project cars has gotten a bigger PR hit right now for using PhysX. It could be that AMDs cards being more CPU-intensive would mean that they just don't have enough oomph left in the CPU to do the CPU-bound physX. nVidia rep on reddit said that the PhysX on Pcars is CPU-only, but then again their own list of "hardware supported PhysX" includes Pcars. Some users report that disabling gpu physx on nVidia tanks performance, others say it has no effect. AMD seems to have much higher performance with WDDM 2.0 on Windows 10.0. Who knows what the final answer really is.

 

GameWorks is being used when nVidia pays for the developers to use it. It is backwards in many ways.

 

However, you can already see how recommended specs on The Witcher 3 are nVidia GTX 770 vs AMD Radeon R9 290, so something sketchy is going on behind the curtains.

[Opcode]

Kk. Even though we already talked about some of this with your video comparison; Lets start with the first quoted post here.

 

"..TressFX is an exception to that." // In it's early form, it looks bad. It looked bad in Tomb Raider no matter how much you want to pain subjectivity on it - it objectively looks bad. If it looks good on Deus Ex, more power to them.

 

"Nvidia can just take their GameWorks stack and shove it because it's really a pile of shit being locked down in the gaming industry (which is ruled by AMD)." // It's not a pile of shit. It's pushing the visuals in gaming forward as much as you guys bitch about it not being able to run on Radeon hardware. AMD rules the gaming industry? According to what? Richard Huddy? Robert Hallock? Please. The people who rule the gaming industry are the ones making the fucking games.

It doesn't look bad in Tomb Raider, albeit it doesn't look super fantastic either due to textures. It's an old game so comparing HairWorks now to TressFX back a few years ago and making a statement such as "it looks like shit in comparison" is straight ignorance. What you see visually is not handled by the physics engine and I can compile a few examples to show you the difference if you would like (you'll need to download and run them). The physics are still realistic and has no performance advantages on either AMD or Nvidia hardware. Which is the selling point of that statement day and night.

 

It's a pile of shit in regards of being a locked down software stack (it's physics aren't as life like as TressFX, but this isn't a debate over which is "better"). I've done a lot of work with physics for a few of my games and I personally wouldn't even touch GameWorks even though it's free. If you notice the trend of game titles adopting any of Nvidia's "technologies" over the years you'll see why Nvidia decided to just push their PhysX stack to GIT. The company is learning the hard way that proprietary software locked down to hardware will never serve them of greater interest because the lack of adoption rate due to a split market. It's in no interest of the the consumer if the they are forced to buy brand A over brand B just for physics. It will deter most to actually buying the competing brand for that very reason and saying f^%k the physics, this is cheaper. Which is something that can be had from several other frameworks (don't think GameWorks and TressFX are the only physics engines out there).

 

Nvidia saw an idea and made their own with it, not that it wasn't already done in some form. They essentially morphed PhysX into the HairWorks tool. PhysX was already used once before to simulate cloth, such as in Mirror's Edge - common sense would tell you it wouldn't be hard to use it for hair. It objectively looks better than TressFX as it sits. We already talked about that and for some reason you think TressFX looks better than HairWorks and I cannot for the life of me see why. It's not something subjective, TressFX objectively looks out of place in the games it's been used in and essentially looks like an anime hair mod for Skyrim, minus the physics of it.

 

Have you personally seen the source code for TressFX? How do you know it's written better?

 

There won't be complaints about TressFX from me when I play Deus Ex because if it looks bad or if it runs bad, I'm not using it because that's what any normal person would do.

 

AMD is the real joke of a company here since I can actually come up with a coherent statement as to why that is: their CPU's suck, their Radeon cards are falling behind (don't you fucking bring up HBM and the 300 series - those aren't out yet so don't even start).

PhysX is actually a component of GameWorks. PhysX doesn't handle hair in the GameWorks stack the VisualFX module handles this and most of the more modern things. I would actually get your hands dirty and play around with the frameworks and see what can be done with both. TressFX has much more realistic physics than GameWorks. More dynamic strands instead of a flexible looking mesh. Nvidia is even on the edge of blaming AMD for having terrible compute performance and using it as a justification for why AMD hardware runs so bad with their physics engine. Which you, me and everyone here knows is a load garbage as GCN has superior compute performance than Maxwell. Give it time and the companies undoings will become far more obvious like that have been prevalent as of late. You can only lock everything down and claim superiority for so long.

 

It's written better from the stance that it will run on either vendor of graphics cards the same. Even TressFX is supposed to be optimized for GCN although there was zero performance difference in Tomb Raider when switching to an Nvidia based product. That tells you even without much input from Nvidia that AMD's team was able to not only get the engine to run fluidly but the same on their competitors hardware. Meanwhile Nvidia has to pull excuses out of left and right cheek as to why their solutions always have problems.

 

Your normal person will complain because such a feature set should be standard for every consumer regardless of what hardware they run. I imagine Deus Ex will be one of them games if TressFX does run like shit it will blow up just as bad as Witcher 3. As there's a lot more things that are being controlled by physics in that game. Then again it could launch with zero problems like most TressFX titles and we won't hear a peep of how AMD is throwing blame on Nvidia for this and that.

 

Right, because a coherent CPU statement justifies a component and architecture that's entirely different. That's like saying I certainly can drive and win in NASCAR because I'm good at racing around my ATV. Where the circumstances are entirely different. Their graphics segment is falling behind not in terms of technological advancements but merely because they keep recycling the same shit even when they do have a newer and more advanced architecture. Although they are doing so for good reason as compromises have to be met based on a business perspective.

[Casperian]

Nvidia didn't have to create their own private API when they knew about Mantle, Vulkan and DX12 all being worked on. Yes it is an investment however it is one that is not necessarily appreciated by PC gamers since it is a walled garden of exclusivity and many of us choose PC gaming to get away from that anti consumer behavior present on consoles

I have to complete disagree with this. Mantle, Vulkan and D3D and render pipelines, GameWorks is not. GameWorks is an API but comparing it to a render pipeline is not a valid thing to do.

The way I see GameWorks is as a pseudo service that NVidia provides to developers and, as with any service, it can be declined. 

 

Also NVidia opened PhysX up on github, I can't link to it now however.

[Victorious Secret]

 

 

 

Yup, Gameworks caused this downgrade. 

[SXCS23]

People want to take it to extremes all of a sudden since they can't form a proper and coherent argument: because Nvidia is doing what they're doing, we're apparently one step away from actual exclusive titles to the graphics vendors.

 

In their minds, Witcher 4 (or whatever CDPR makes next) is going to not even boot if a Radeon card is present in the system.

 

I just can't comprehend how people can not see that it's only visual options that will help differentiate NVidia from AMD? Without GameWorks, what would compel one with a 1440p 60fps monitor to purchase NVidia over AMD? It's simply adding optional features to a game. A game lacks visual options, they rage. A game gives several options including additional options if you have a capable GPU and they rage.

 

I can completely understand raging about a graphics downgrade, but I just cannot fathom why some are raging about this. I just can't see things how they see them, which is odd because I can usually see both sides of the argument, but I just can't on this one.

[Guest Kloaked]

I just can't comprehend how people can not see that it's only visual options that will help differentiate NVidia from AMD? Without GameWorks, what would compel one with a 1440p 60fps monitor to purchase NVidia over AMD? It's simply adding optional features to a game. A game lacks visual options, they rage. A game gives several options including additional options if you have a capable GPU and they rage.

 

I can completely understand raging about a graphics downgrade, but I just cannot fathom why some are raging about this. I just can't see things how they see them, which is odd because I can usually see both sides of the argument, but I just can't on this one.

 

What's worse is the downgrade is probably going to be blamed on Gameworks. Just you watch.

[Sammael]

.....why doesn't AMD just come up with their own equivalent of gameworks?

 

Or was that essentially what Mantle was?

 

I don't think these sorts of graphics libraries should be tied to a vendor at all.  The game engines themselves ought to have their own tools built in, or open source tools should be able to be ported to specific game engines.  

 

Note we don't hear about gameworks issues with the frostbite 3 engine that EA uses for games like battlefield/dragon age I/basically all their new games.  Because EA has enough money and talent to pay for their own physics rendering engines and other special effects that work in their engine.  They don't NEED to go begging nvidia for table scraps of added effects.

 

unity

unreal 4 (actually, this is kind of a street whore engine for nvidia now with the built in gameworks)

cryengine

 

etc, those seem to be the larger open engines that THRONGS of developers use.  Why not build rendering code for physics effects and hair effects and everything else into the BLANKING ENGINE !!!!!!!

 

It's so god damn obvious.