Nvidia Responds To Witcher 3 GameWorks Controversy, PC Gamers On The Offensive

filip said:
The 780 was not the top card though. The 780TI was, and at launch the 980 sc was about 10% better than the 780Ti Link. Looks like the 5-10% upgrades are already here unless you want to fork over $1000 for premium Titan X performance.
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980 Ti isn't out yet.
 
5150Joker said:
So what? Next time don't buy an AMD card if you want gameworks effects enabled without any penalty. Otherwise cry all you want, this is business and nvidia has no obligation to you or amd.
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I'd be happy just to get performance that isn't being sabotaged or deliberately blocked by Nvidia.
 
filip said:
The 780 was not the top card though. The 780TI was, and at launch the 980 sc was about 10% better than the 780Ti Link. Looks like the 5-10% upgrades are already here unless you want to fork over $1000 for premium Titan X performance.
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The 980 is the direct successor to the 780 in the product line. The forthcoming 980 Ti can be compared to the 780 Ti, which going by TITAN X benchmarks may be an even better 40% increase in performance than the 780->980.
 
Armenius said:
The 980 is the direct successor to the 780 in the product line. The forthcoming 980 Ti can be compared to the 780 Ti, which going by TITAN X benchmarks may be an even better 40% increase in performance than the 780->980.
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That is not how GPU's work. Yes the numbers match (780 -980) but the idea that you would compare the 780 to the 980 when there is a 780Ti is a little absurd. I am comparing the best from Kepler to the best, at the time, Maxwell is that not a fair comparison?
The comparison is 780=970 and 780Ti=980 in my eyes don't see how others would look at it differently.
 
filip said:
That is not how GPU's work. Yes the numbers match (780 -980) but the idea that you would compare the 780 to the 980 when there is a 780Ti is a little absurd. I am comparing the best from Kepler to the best, at the time, Maxwell is that not a fair comparison?
The comparison is 780=970 and 780Ti=980 in my eyes don't see how others would look at it differently.
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So what happens when the 980 Ti comes out? You're going to compare it to the 980?
 
dmonkey said:
So what happens when the 980 Ti comes out? You're going to compare it to the 980?
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Let me see... I think I will compare it to the 390x as that is the reason it is being released, and I can also compare it to the Titan X.
 
filip said:
Let me see... I think I will compare it to the 390x as that is the reason it is being released, and I can also compare it to the Titan X.
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You're avoiding the question. But, eh, who cares. :p Edit: OK, compare it to the Titan X lol.
 
Creig said:
I'd be happy just to get performance that isn't being sabotaged or deliberately blocked by Nvidia.
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Tell AMD to work with the developer and update their drivers, instead of blaming everyone else.

Or just don't buy AMD and you won't have all these problems.
 
PRIME1 said:
Tell AMD to work with the developer and update their drivers, instead of blaming everyone else.

Or just don't buy AMD and you won't have all these problems.
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+1 can't wait for $1500+ Nvidia cards, I will pre-order them if they let me.
 
I don't see the problem here. The vast majority of video cards out there are Nvidia. If a developer of a game wants to reach the largest market possible for their game then they develop to the hardware that is used by the vast majority of gamers. That would be Nvidia. It makes perfect sense to use gameworks then to further their development and achieve that goal. It's neither the developer's, nor Nvidia's fault AMD has relegated themselves to near triviality in the marketplace.

If you want to support AMD, that's fine. However, expecting developers to spend resources developing and optimizing to a platform that only a small minority of the user base is running is silly. Until AMD can resurrect their standing in the market this will continue to be the norm. It's not the developers responsibility or their competitors to do that for them.
 
Missed a pretty important piece of history. Microsoft for a long time was not planning on releasing a new low-level API. Note how we've been on DX11 for quite a long time. Hell even DX9 is commonly used. (10 being tied to Vista hurt it's adoption in dev cycles).

AMD pushed Mantle as a means to demo the importance of a Low Level API. Vulkan (Vulcan?) was also put out as a means to support other low-level API's showed Microsoft that there was still healthy demand for this.

AMD was positioning themselves to have a low-level standard API in case Microsoft didn't come around. Mantle wasn't heavily used, but it accomplished the goal of ensuring that there would at least be some standard low-level API available.
 
5150Joker said:
So what? Next time don't buy an AMD card if you want gameworks effects enabled without any penalty. Otherwise cry all you want, this is business and nvidia has no obligation to you or amd.
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Creig said:
I'd be happy just to get performance that isn't being sabotaged or deliberately blocked by Nvidia.
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Nvidia is in this case in the area of creating monopolistic position by pressing idependent content providers to select Nvidia hardware. This might be the case for class action suing Nvidia for a couple of billions which fat lawyers would take :D.

5150Joker said:
Why does Titan X need DP? The originals only had it because that's what Kepler focused on at the time. I'm happy DP isn't wasting space in the Titan X. Your 5-10% performance increase per year fear mongering isn't supported by facts....
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filip said:
The Titans's selling point was as far as I was hearing DP. What is it's selling point now 12gb gddr5? The facts are from history for 5-10% increases, just look at Intel....
Why will Nvidia be compelled to give us better upgrades when they can do what I have pointed out. A nice 5-10% upgrade and then unoptimized drivers for the previous generation. That 5-10% will go through the roof and old cards will be obsolete... don't trust me though, it's already happening (just look at project cars benchmarks). ;)
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1. DP was a desirable feature since it allowed for using basically the same chip in high-end consumer and professional cards which is small but enormously profitable market . But very recently this has changed in revolutionary way. There is emerging colossal new market in the machine learning & computer vision, think e.g. about assisted and self-driving cars, Nvidia chips in each car. These new applications do not need DP, even more - they can do with less than full SP but require colossal parallel processing. Nvidia Pascal chips will be optimized just for these applications. It may be so that Nvidia will drop the DP market completely since new Intel Knights Landing chips will be extremely competitive (imagine next generation Xeon processor with 72 cores).

2. It is true that there are incremental increases in the processing power of chips OF THE SAME DESIGN GENERATION, e.g. Kepler, Maxwell. But between the high-end chips of different generations there is signifcant jump. Add to this hardware generation changes. With the Pascal chips there will be 40% hardware generation jump plus something like 30% design jump. Giant change by any means and coming next year.
 
wirk said:
*snip*
2. It is true that there are incremental increases in the processing power of chips OF THE SAME DESIGN GENERATION, e.g. Kepler, Maxwell. But between the high-end chips of different generations there is signifcant jump. Add to this hardware generation changes. With the Pascal chips there will be 40% hardware generation jump plus something like 30% design jump. Giant change by any means and coming next year.
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Yes there will be nice improvements as we still have some competition, and thanks to AMD we will see bridge-less crossfire and HBM. But at the same time Nvidia is dropping support for older cards (kepler) really hard and fast. This adds to the received notion that there were larger improvements than there actually where.
My 780 is now comparable to, just under, a 960, all hail Nvida and the technological advances of dropping driver support for previous generations.
 
PRIME1 said:
The 295X2 was $1500. AMD fans were ok with that. I know, it's only wrong when NVIDIA does something.
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A year ago. Meanwhile the Titan Z was something like $3,000 MSRP.
It's been $600-$700 even before the Titan X, $999 even before the 900-series was released.
 
The bottom line is the reason AMD is in trouble is not Gameworks, it's the FACT that Nvidia has a 70% market share. That 30% is split between AMD and Intel integrated graphics. That is a gigantic problem. Gameworks would NEVER have been entertained by many of these developers had that number been much closer together. AMD tried similar methods to Gameworks with Mantle and TressFX, but the reason they HAD to give away the code and that it never actually took root was simply because even then Nvidia still had a majority share. The whole Tomb Raider TressFX thing was as AMD would like to show it, as them being altruistic by giving their source code out, but was it really? My take is very different, they were forced to release it because of Nvidia's market share and the developer having a serious issues with Nvidia users complaining. At the time they were probably still in the 60/40 Nvidia/AMD+other split.

Understand that if every single AMD owner boycotted a game, it would be a significant hit but not fatal. If every single Nvidia owner boycotted a game it would be fatal to the game dev. That is the reality of where AMD stands. The 390x is where it has to make it or I am not sure if AMD can survive. If it slips anymore in market share Nvidia will basically have free reign over what it can do. At 80/20 market share it will only not by definition alone be a monopoly.

In a post in another in thread in the gaming section, someone made a comment on how Nvidia releases drivers as PR, and the differences in performance are usually nothing as to what is claimed. That may or may not be true and in the end it doesn't matter, but it was/still is a brilliant move and gave Nvidia a much better reputation among buyers. AMD still seems to refuse to follow it, seemingly hoarding it's driver fixes for it's 2-3 month driver releases. Why not follow Nvidia's example just to improve their tarnished, horrible driver release reputation? It doesn't even cost them much money at all and would have some positive impact.
 
PRIME1 said:
The 295X2 was $1500. AMD fans were ok with that. I know, it's only wrong when NVIDIA does something.
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Slow down cowboy, I don't want duel gpu's for $1500. I want single gpu's for $1500, and I don't even want any special features. Think of it like this a 980 for $1500, I'll take two.
 
razor1 said:
I stated the code can't be shared with AMD. There is no need to the developer can change the code for the AMD path as needed. Dev's with the proper license which grants them access to the source can change the code, if they couldn't there is no reason to release the code in the first place that defeats the purpose of buying 3d party middleware. This is common to all 3d party proprietary middleware, If I was to license a 3d engine that has no relationship with any of the IHV's I would not be able to share that code with them. I can change the code as I wish and send them the executable though for testing and feedback.
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Let me ask you this to see if I understand the situation correctly. Gameworks was created to make coding games easier and thus cheaper (while adding new features). Why would a game developer spend EXTRA money to gain access to the Gameworks source code and then spend EXTRA time to optimize the game for AMD hardware?
 
pandora's box said:
If that happens, you can kiss AMD goodbye. AKA 3DFX and Glide all over again.








http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive#Cause_of_decline

Actually, reading that wiki page, it is striking the amount of similarities between 3DFX and AMD. AMD going "More GPU's", while NVidia says "One Strong GPU". AMD going "Mantle API!", while NVidia says "DirectX". And finally most people that are buying new GPU's today are going Nvidia. Nvidia is close to 80% market share currently in terms of discrete GPU's
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You don't know what's inside a PS4 or XboxOne then?
 
rinaldo00 said:
Let me ask you this to see if I understand the situation correctly. Gameworks was created to make coding games easier and thus cheaper (while adding new features). Why would a game developer spend EXTRA money to gain access to the Gameworks source code and then spend EXTRA time to optimize the game for AMD hardware?
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otherwise they have to make everything from ground up, which takes even more time and more cost.

Look at Unreal Engine 4 they have been talking about adding in AO similar to that of Cry Engine 3 since it came out, its been a year and half and still waiting though 4.8 should come with it. How much money and time went into it and still being put into it? Well we know time, 1.5 years and still counting

HBAO+ has already been part of Unreal Engine 4 for the past few months and is cross platform, and works very well on both IHV's.

Some of the effect libraries that nV provides with Gameworks aren't simple shaders they have to be integrated into a project, which will force dev's to change their engine code, and more specifically render code.

Optimization of code is actaully fairly quick when you look at development time compared to the actually creation of an algorithm based on math and then debugging the software.
 
rinaldo00 said:
Let me ask you this to see if I understand the situation correctly. Gameworks was created to make coding games easier and thus cheaper (while adding new features). Why would a game developer spend EXTRA money to gain access to the Gameworks source code and then spend EXTRA time to optimize the game for AMD hardware?
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But if they don't give them the code free and "open-source" obviously Nvidia is being anti-competitive and ebil!
 
5150Joker said:
So what? Next time don't buy an AMD card if you want gameworks effects enabled without any penalty. Otherwise cry all you want, this is business and nvidia has no obligation to you or amd.
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Game dev's certainly have an obligation for it to run correctly on your machine though. They're not blameless in this at all. even 15% of your user base is significant to the point of requiring you to get off your ass. Anti-competitive practices, no matter who is partaking in them, suck for EVERYONE. None of these companies are blameless overall, but nvidia certainly takes the cake recently. AMD has made many poor choices and poor business decisions over the years from having a pretty terrible CEO that gave himself raises in the face of falling stock prices, operating losses and fab closures. They NEVER recovered from the early 2000's Intel debacle where Intel bribed OEM mfr's with Intel chips for cheap w/ the caveat that they don't buy any AMD chips whatsoever. That only cost intel a measly 1.4B dollars for BILLIONS of dollars in gained revenue by pushing their competitor completely out of the market permanantly. It's just not good for anyone but the company making money hand over fist.
 
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dmonkey said:
But if they don't give them the code free and "open-source" obviously Nvidia is being anti-competitive and ebil!
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doesn't need to be open source along as its available to buy and the cost isn't that great compared to actually developing it themselves.
 
Otherwise cry all you want, this is business and nvidia has no obligation to you or amd.
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I like to think the developers/publishers have an obligation to everyone who buys their product (Intel/AMD/Nvidia). I mean if they're going to charge me $60 for a game, and they're also charging a GTX 770 owner $60 for the game, I expect them to run identically at no fault of the developer. Especially since they have Min/Rec requirements for this exact purpose.

Pinning blame on AMD is one thing, it actually being AMD's fault is another thing entirely...

The current AMD driver works perfect on, I don't know, hundreds of other games. Why is SMS having a problem with it and nobody else? Sounds to me like they suck at designing games. AMD sucks at creating drivers, sure, but it's not causing any of my other games to run at 50% speed compared to Nvidia.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
I like to think the developers/publishers have an obligation to everyone who buys their product (Intel/AMD/Nvidia). I mean if they're going to charge me $60 for a game, and they're also charging a GTX 770 owner $60 for the game, I expect them to run identically at no fault of the developer. Especially since they have Min/Rec requirements for this exact purpose.

Pinning blame on AMD is one thing, it actually being AMD's fault is another thing entirely...
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Welcome to reality, where you don't make as much as your boss, and he probably has a bigger penis than you.
 
razor1 said:
otherwise they have to make everything from ground up, which takes even more time and more cost.

Look at Unreal Engine 4 they have been talking about adding in AO similar to that of Cry Engine 3 since it came out, its been a year and half and still waiting though 4.8 should come with it. How much money and time went into it and still being put into it? Well we know time, 1.5 years and still counting

HBAO+ has already been part of Unreal Engine 4 for the past few months and is cross platform, and works very well on both IHV's.

Some of the effect libraries that nV provides with Gameworks aren't simple shaders they have to be integrated into a project, which will force dev's to change their engine code, and more specifically render code.

Optimization of code is actaully fairly quick when you look at development time compared to the actually creation of an algorithm based on math and then debugging the software.
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You did not understand my question. A dev that uses Gameworks features for his game has very little reason to optimize any Gameworks features for AMD.
 
So, doesn't a developer have to explain why their game runs like crap on amd hardware if it's on xbox and ps4? So some optimization on amd hardware is necessary for any multi platform developer.
 
rinaldo00 said:
You did not understand my question. A dev that uses Gameworks features for his game has very little reason to optimize any Gameworks features for AMD.
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Yes they do, they should look into it, if they don't I wouldn't consider them as a good dev.

Performance testing is important when using 3d party libraries and code, but its not the end all and be all of course, first get the 3d party library working then get working with no bugs, then improve performance to acceptable rates if needed.

Dev's should look into it and will, most AAA dev teams spend a good amount of time when QAing to do performance tests, of course they aren't really comparing which is doing better hardware wise but they have to get things working to where they are happy with it.

The same thing when a dev ports a game from a console if they don't look at how it runs on nV hardware that's not good either.
 
rinaldo00 said:
Let me ask you this to see if I understand the situation correctly. Gameworks was created to make coding games easier and thus cheaper (while adding new features). Why would a game developer spend EXTRA money to gain access to the Gameworks source code and then spend EXTRA time to optimize the game for AMD hardware?
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Because they have an obligation as a game developer to make it run on the hardware available to their userbase? What the fuck kind of stupid ass assumption are you trying to make here? Well a lot of our users are on nvidia, but a statistically significant portion of them are also on AMD. LOL fuck those guys we'll just leave it running like shit. People whose game doesnt' run correctly are far and away the most vocal and we're nowhere near the point of minimum requirements of only having an nvidia card or gtfo.
 
razor1 said:
Yes they do, they should look into it, if they don't I wouldn't consider them as a good dev.

Performance testing is important when using 3d party libraries and code, but its not the end all and be all of course, first get the 3d party library working then get working with no bugs, then improve performance to acceptable rates if needed.

Dev's should look into it and will, most AAA dev teams spend a good amount of time when QAing to do performance tests, of course they aren't really comparing which is doing better hardware wise but they have to get things working to where they are happy with it.

The same thing when a dev ports a game from a console if they don't look at how it runs on nV hardware that's not good either.
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If a game dev is BUYING Gameworks to help using new features easily what incentive does he have to spend time getting it to work well with AMD? An extra 20% market?
 
rinaldo00 said:
If a game dev is BUYING Gameworks to help using new features easily what incentive does he have to spend time getting it to work well with AMD? An extra 20% market?
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Well you still have to make sure it works for that 20% don't you? Why would a dev want to possibly loose 20% of their sales?

Dev's have to do performance testing anyways after integration into their project even for nV's products, this isn't as simple as put the library here, or source code and compile and its good to go, it would be prudent to do it for AMD cards at the same time it saves money and potentially increases sales.
 
w00t69 said:
Because they have an obligation as a game developer to make it run on the hardware available to their userbase? What the fuck kind of stupid ass assumption are you trying to make here? Well a lot of our users are on nvidia, but a statistically significant portion of them are also on AMD. LOL fuck those guys we'll just leave it running like shit.
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That is EXACTLY what they will do, or tell them to turn the feature off. Don't believe me? It already happened.

A quote from a Witcher 3 dev


"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. Radeon users are encouraged to disable NVIDIA HairWorks if the performance is below expectations."
 
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