NVIDIA Gameworks

[ripper101]

Alright so what's the deal with Gameworks, I don't know how many games Gameworks is on and what exactly it does. But I am pretty sure it favors Nvidia cards in performance over AMD cards. does nvidia pay game Devs to do this to leverage sales towards nvidia cards?

[App4that]

All you need to know is if you want to play Gameworks games you will want to own an Nvidia graphics card.

[Patrick Bateman]

Alright so what's the deal with Gameworks, I don't know how many games Gameworks is on and what exactly it does. But I am pretty sure it favors Nvidia cards in performance over AMD cards. does nvidia pay game Devs to do this to leverage sales towards nvidia cards?

look at this video : its gameworks in a nutshell

[Nexxus]

in b4

[xAcid9]

Got time to spare? I mean a couple of hours.

 

 

 

[ripper101]

All you need to know is if you want to play Gameworks games you will want to own an Nvidia graphics card.

Kind of what I want to know is did I make a mistake buying a 390x?

[App4that]

Kind of what I want to know is did I make a mistake buying a 390x?

Depends on the games you play. But it's a solid GPU regardless and you should be happy with it. Just know that you will have problems with Gameworks games and not be able to use some of the features such as curtain anti aliasing.

[Belgarathian]

Kind of what I want to know is did I make a mistake buying a 390x?

 

I have SLI 970s and regret not getting 390x's. 

 

That said, Gameworks isn't even stable 80% of the time on my 970s so I play most games with it turned off. So no, you're probably not missing out on much anyway. 

[BrightCandle]

https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworks

 

In essence its a series of special effects and tools for games to improve the current state of the art in graphical rendering. It was formed after Nvidia noticed that most games did not use state of the art techniques in their games and thus top end cards weren't being used to the fullest. Nvidia developed a suite of middleware that runs on DX11 (so compatible with all cards) that can provide those effects. A large number of games use it, most of which people don't talk about its support at all because they don't even realise the explosions or water effects or lighting system are provided by gameworks at all. It also includes a few Nvidia specific features, an advanced form of HDAO called HDAO+ which improves the depth of shadow, a couple of temporal anti aliasing techniques and CUDA which also underpins PhysX for the GPU (but PhysX runs on the CPU and most games just use that).

 

This is what it actually is, and it improves the image quality of a lot of games. AMD has a different perspective on the intention and what it is but they have never provided any proof and AMD fans that only watch Richard Huddy don't often listen to the other side of the story. Anyway research it yourself from the source (nvidia's website) and have a look for videos with Tom Paterson (like on pcper.com) talking about it. Its an interesting technology and one we all benefit from most days since its free for developers to use and they do so in a lot of games.

[NuclearPeace]

Gameworks is a series of effects that NVIDIA makes that developers put into their game because its quicker than making it themselves.

 

A lot of these effects are pretty advanced stuff such as god rays, (more) realistic waves, volumetric effects, tessellation, and lighting effects. Because they are so complex and thus computationally taxing, NVIDIA tries to take advantage of their architectural strength in tesselation to make it easier to pull off the effects. Despite that, they are still very performance hungry additions.

 

Because GCN isn't as great at tesselation as Kepler (let alone Maxwell), Gameworks effects run poorly on AMD cards. With your 390x, its best to just ignore Gameworks settings.