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  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Now with even more AMD performance hindering features.
  • madwolfa - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Nobody is forcing you to use any of the GameWorks features on your AMD card.
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    I don't think you understand what GameWorks is and how it works ;).
  • jasonelmore - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Traditionally gameworks features can be disabled in the options menu. See Batman, Syndicate, Tomb Raider, and Witcher 3. You will just have to do without those effects tho.

    3 out of 4 people use nvidia according to steam survey's, so i can see why developers use them.
  • madwolfa - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Correct. And, for what it's worth, even I having a GTX 980, almost always turn the GW effects off.
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    So 25% of buyers will pay the same price but will not be able to use the features because Nvidia arbitrarily decided there should be so many hurdles around getting those features to work that no amount of optimization will get around, right?
    Mind you, this is less about an intrinsic limitation of AMD hardware and more about an arbitrary limitation of the SDK. And while I get Nvidia is willing to go as far as it can with unfair practices knowing the reward is much higher than the risk (see Intel's identical strategy in the past) It sounds at least ignorant to support this as a customer regardless of what card you buy today.

    When MS said Win10 will only be supported on specific hardware (although they support the sibling kernel of WS 2016) everybody jumped to protest. But now it's just "don't use it then". Just to show you how educated the average internet user is.

    Ask any developer who ever used GW and you'll get the same answer ;). When powerful hardware gets so crippled you start to get why Nvidia is so closed and secretive.
    I have no problem with a GPU being too weak to run a certain feature. I do however have a problem with a GPU being too "not Nvidia" to run it. I had to buy a 980 to run games with full features although my AMD card should have been able. This means Nvidia's "optimizations" artificially cost me money.

    And yes, a certain developer's internal surveys showed that most users actually disable much of the GW stuff because some wavy white hair isn't wort it. The main purpose is to slam AMD because actually making hardware that is that much better is a lot harder. So you make the competion artificially look worse.
  • madwolfa - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    How I see it is that Nvidia is trying to go extra mile for the games to look slightly better with their hardware. It's not like the games automatically look like crap without those features. They are a bonus for Nvidia card owners and you're free to turn them off in most cases, whether you own Nvidia card or not. I don't understand how it hinders AMD in any way.
  • xthetenth - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    The "features" get turned on in reviews.
  • Sttm - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Call anyone uneducated that disagrees with him. Yet this guy is such an ignorant AMD fanboy. You wouldn't have any of these features to even turn on if not for Nvidia. They are providing to developers the Gameworks options, and if they didn't the developers wouldn't have bothered to create their own version of them. Who in their right mind thinks Bethesda would have come up with volumetric lighting for Fallout 4 on PC? That they would have dedicated engineers to create a feature only PCs are powerful enough to run.

    Gameworks is a positive to AMD owners, some of the effects you will be able to run, some you wont, but without it, you'd have none, and if you weren't such an ignorant fanboy you would see that.
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    I don't think we're on the same page here. When I called people uneducated it was because the enormous difference in reactions when another software company artificially restricted the use of their software to specific hardware versus the reaction now (MS offering support for W10 only on new gen CPUs). And I was pretty clear on that.
    But it seems you're here to call me a fanboy and then continue to sing an ode to Nvidia and you don't even try to be close to the truth. This while the soon to be most widely used API is based on AMD innovation.

    Anyway, petty insults aside, when you take roughly equally powerful hardware and then you "optimize" a bit until some features basically cripple the competition but you see no foul play that's you not wanting to see it. I don't expect to run 4K with a Radeon 5000 series. But when all the headline features of GW fail to run properly even on high end AMD hardware then this was one big purpose for their "optimization".

    When AMD innovates everybody gets to enjoy it but when Nvidia innovates you have to buy their cards to use it. Now can I call you uneducated for failing to see this? I don't have to be a fanboy to see when someone doesn't play ball. And it doesn' have to be related to what I own or use. And if a feature doesn't work because the HW is just too weak I can understand. When it doesn't work on certain hardware by your design it's just low regardless of what you or I like.
  • Sttm - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    "when Nvidia innovates you have to buy their cards to use it."

    It is almost like they are business and not a charity.
  • close - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    You're right here. And everything is fair game when money is involved. Intel did the same thing for business reasons. That was also fair, right?
  • close - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Damn edit button. Also this is why I brought MS in the discussion. They also have good business reasons behind the decision to shove Win10 down your throat through any means, through misleading actions, through tricks, etc. But having a business reason can't justify everything.

    And it takes a special guy to look at 2 identical pieces of poop and actually decide that one of them tastes good because it comes from someone they like ;). No dude, unfair business practices are unfair even if you like that particular company or if the strategy actually works and brings money. And this isn't about what you or I like or what card we own and what games we play. If this kind of strategy is in encouraged it will become the norm and you will get to see it more and more.

    And using an SDK that leaves a quarter of the users unable to enjoy the full set of features in a game for purely arbitrary ("special" SW optimization) reasons is disrespectful to those people especially when their cards are technically powerful enough for them. But I guess respect is too much to ask from a developer you give money to.
    Remember this when software developers start artificially limiting software to promote hardware upgrades. Like when MS will say that if you want who knows what encryption feature or an improved scheduler you have to buy the latest CPU even if your current one would do the job just fine.

    BTW, CD Projekt Red did give AMD a heads up to allow them to also optimize for GW. Problem is Nvidia really did a good job in crippling AMD cards and the developer could not "help" AMD because the agreement with Nvidia doesn't allow any kind of changes that might benefit the competition. So I would say that Nvidia is really abusing their position sine such a strategy involves using your market share to artificially force exclusivity. And at some point someone will stop caring about that NDA ;).
  • medi03 - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    BS.
    TreeFX is there, no need to cripple GPUs with Hairworks.
  • medi03 - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    As in, say, Project Cars.
    Oh, wait...
  • Zak - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Someone please tell AMD so couple of years down the road they won't cry that they never heard about this when Witcher 4 comes out and their cards can't render something in the game.
  • 06GTOSC - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    AMD knows about Gameworks. The issue is that developers are roped into using Nvidia specific technology that AMD has no way to optimize for themselves. It's wrong. AMD is supporting open standards for all to use. Nvidia is supporting technology only they benefit from.
  • Dribble - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    By "supporting" you mean producing a few power point slides. There is no open equivalent to most games works features. This isn't like rendering where you can pick vulkan or DX12, both really exist and both have equivalent functionality. In this world you basically have gamesworks or nothing.

    Hence the choice for most games is really a straight console port without extra features for the PC, or one with extra features provided by nvidia.
  • DrKlahn - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    OpenCL could be used if Nvidia wanted. But they have no interest in that. It wouldn't further their goal of creating a monopoly where they can charge whatever they like for their products
  • Dribble - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Gamesworks using OpenCL? Other then h/w physx I think everything runs on AMD gpu's, so whatever it's coded in clearly is open.
  • DiLi - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Do you understand what open means? The code legally cannot be modified or shared. Have you even seen the NDA agreement you make with NV when you decide to use Gameworks in your game? It's pretty clear the agreement restricts data between YOU and NV, and you cannot post or use modified code without NV's consent. That is why I will not support GameWorks or NV proprietary tech in any software I create - it's not open and can't be "optimized" without consent.

    If you don't believe it, go and try to get the "open" source code from Nvidia and read the agreement carefully.

    As for "other then h/w physx I think everything runs on AMD"

    Really? Care to list at least one?
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    He won't list any. Most people have no idea what GameWorks actually is. They assume it's a bunch of options in the game's "graphics" menu that you just disable or enable and it's just like changing the resolution.
  • Dribble - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    "He won't list any. Most people have no idea what GameWorks actually is. They assume it's a bunch of options in the game's "graphics" menu that you just disable or enable and it's just like changing the resolution."

    It is a bunch of options in the games graphics menu that you can enable and disable. It's coded exactly the same way the options that the dev added were coded (C++/#/DX compiled by microsoft compiler). It's just that nvidia wrote them and provided them as libraries, exactly the same way as all the 3rd party libraries some game uses (of which there will be dozens written by all sorts of companies and most of them not open source).
  • Dribble - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    I don't think you really understand what you are talking about - you know just cause it's called "OpenCL" doesn't mean you have to let everyone see your code? C is open too and you can't look at everyone's C code. It's just a language. The important point being it runs not only on Nvidia but on AMD as well, that is true of gamesworks - it runs on AMD hardware, mostly as well as it runs on Nvidia hardware. Most of the performance deficits tend to be because nvidia hardware is better at tessellation and the tessellation level by default is set to high for AMD to run well. That is something the dev's can fix by lowering tessellation level (or AMD can force it in drivers) and then it tends to run fine.

    "Really? Care to list at least one?"

    Everything I think - pick a gameswork game and tell me what gameswork effects you don't see on an AMD card.
  • DiLi - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    "I don't think you really understand what you are talking about - you know just cause it's called "OpenCL" doesn't mean you have to let everyone see your code? C is open too and you can't look at everyone's C code. It's just a language.

    Useless "dribble" to avoid actually reading and commenting on the license? How does OpenCL enter this discussion?

    " The important point being it runs not only on Nvidia but on AMD as well, that is true of gamesworks - it runs on AMD hardware, mostly as well as it runs on Nvidia hardware."

    Do you honestly believe that? If that were the case, then there would be absolutely no need to even have an NV card. Stop joking; you know this is not true at all.

    Also, look at this link and tell me what effects you are referencing:

    https://developer.nvidia.com/what-is-gameworks

    I'm just curious, and want to know exactly which one you want to learn about today. Just because a Gameworks game runs fine on AMD does not mean those effects are enabled.
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    NVIDIA already does charge "whatever they like" for products. Ever heard of the Titan? NVIDIA's goal is to stay in business, pay its employees, please shareholders, and excite its customer base. NVIDIA will never have a legal monopoly as long as Intel continues to integrate graphics into nearly all of its CPUs. GameWorks is a product that they sell to developers. Whatever impact it has on AMD customers is literally not NVIDIA's business - so why would they ever want to optimize it for AMD? That's on the developers of the game, just like it's on the developers to use DX11, DX12, Vulkan or all of the above.
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    There's a difference between "not optimizing for AMD" and "intentionally crippling everything not Nvidia". Which basically translates into AMD sine Intel has no say in the game world.
  • close - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    And no, they don't charge what they like, they charge what the market likes. Because for now AMD is still there to undercut their prices. If things go like this and AMD has to fight 'fair' business practices from Intel and Nvidia alike they won't be around for more than 2 or 3 years. And you' get the chance to find out exactly what Nvidia 'likes' to charge.

    When Intel was offering 'incentives' to use their CPUs somebody must have used the exact reasoning you're using now. 'What impact it has on AMD customers is not Intel's business'. Apparently it wan't quite so. When you abuse your position to force a competitor out of the game will sooner or later prove to be disappointing either to Nvidia or to the customers.

    And BTW, try asking a developer who actually worked with GW what they think about the "optimizations" in the SDK. The reason You can't properly optimize for AMD is because it's not just about optimizing, you have to jump the hurdles put there especially to prevent this. And if history has taught (some of) us something it' that every company will abuse it's position for another chunk of cash. Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. But Nvidia wouldn't do this because fanboys all over the world voted not to...
  • Sttm - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    More price fear mongering from AMD fanboys. They have been saying this shit for years about Intel, and guess what, a solid i5 still costs about $200, a great i7 about $330... AMD hasn't been competitive this decade and yet Intel's prices haven't skyrocketed....

    This fear mongering was proven wrong over Intel, and its wrong about Nvidia.
  • rhysiam - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Yes, and that brand new $200 i5 is about 25% faster than the $200 Sandy Bridge i5 which was released more than 5 years ago. Price may not have moved much, but neither has performance! Of course lack of competition isn't the only factor in that equation, but it's a big one nonetheless.
  • Sttm - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Yeah because Intel has been targeting power and the iGPU which both have been improved immensely. Which they might have done even if AMD could compete in raw speed, as the PC business has been shifting to mobile for years now.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    Whether GW intentionally cripples AMD hardware is not the debate because the goal of GW is to optimize for NVIDIA hardware and its the game devs that control what methods are used to display game content. It's the developer's fault for using GW. They could do everything using OpenCL if they wanted to, but they clearly don't want to, hence GW titles.
  • medi03 - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    There is TresFX that runs great on AMD AND nVidia cards, yet Witcher uses Hairworks.
    Try harder.
  • Space Jam - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    AMD can optimize the execution, even if the source is blackboxed. It's more work, not impossible.

    "Nvidia is supporting technology only they benefit from."

    Well yes, that's literally the point of every proprietary tech, and the point of every tech (proprietary or otherwise) developed by a hardware designer.

    "AMD is supporting open standards for all to use."

    That isn't out of the generosity of AMD's heart but their market position and advertising strategy. They're not a charity.
  • xthetenth - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    That is correct. The companies are using different marketing to try and get customers to buy their products. Customers deciding on a product is also incentivizing one or the other. Just because it's a legitimate thing for a business to do doesn't mean it's in the customer's interest.
  • medi03 - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Experienced game developers say otherwise.
  • Space Jam - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    To further elaborate, software tech which AMD or Nvidia makes doesn't sell games, it sells GPUs. Even if the tech is open source. Don't lose sight of the basic mechanics of a business, especially not an international corporation with stockholders.
  • DrKlahn - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    When AMD has had parity or slight dominance they have not pushed proprietary software to hurt the competitors. Nvidia, as usual, has done the opposite. They've even used tessellation that can't be seen to hurt AMD and their previous customers. They want a monopoly. They want $500 GTX 970's. I've followed this industry since the 3DFX days and Nvidia has never been anything but dirty. They do engineer a nice card and write some good drivers though
  • BinaryTB - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Don't know if AMD is always the "good guy". TressFX was proprietary AMD and ran horribly on Nvidia cards (remember Tomb Raider 2013?). They recently (as in December 2015) made TressFX open, but that doesn't mean they've never cared about profits or proprietary software.

    I'm glad they're going open with what they're releasing now, but I wouldn't blanketly state that they would always go for the solution that wouldn't hurt competitors.
  • DrKlahn - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    AMD is publishing the source code for TressFX for anyone to use as far as I know. Even if they didn't at first, it's a far cry from what Nvidia has done. Again Nvidia makes a good product and I know why they do what they do. But based on their track record it should be the last company any of us want to see with a monopoly.
  • xthetenth - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    Honestly with the last bunch of drivers being incredibly problematic, and how it looks like Maxwell's scheduler getting gutted to make room for more cores is going to hurt it in the long term, I'm not that impressed with NV's drivers or cards these days.
  • Zak - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    I guess you're not familiar with the story I was referring to: AMD's chief scientist and the top brass complained that they were not aware of HairWorks being used in Witcher 3 until two months before the game release and accused Nvidia of sabotaging AMD's performance which was utter bullshit, as the HairWorks feature was widely demoed for two years and the developer said AMD was involved all along. Then it took AMD five months to fix their drivers.
  • BinaryTB - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    I believe a similar occurrence occurred when Rage was released. John Carmack was lambasting AMD's drivers on his Twitter account on release day.
  • ToTTenTranz - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    The Hairworks code was CHANGED at the last minute to include sub-pixel levels of tesselation into Geralt's/Creatures' hair, and a driver that limited maximum tesselation levels was released about 2 months after the game was out.

    My guess is CD PROJEKT RED learned their lesson and they're probably not using gameworks again in future titles. Besides, The Witcher 3 was so successful that they don't need use "free proprietary effects" for Cyberpunk anyways.
  • jasonelmore - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    just no.....gameworks is a library, not a hardware specific set of features. The library could very well be made by someone else, like AMD. AMD just didn't make a open set of tools for developers. they like to make a few very specific standards, and hope everyone picks them up.
  • medi03 - Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - link

    BS.
    Gameworks is a library that notoriously cripples competition beyond repair.
    When 960 beats 290x.
  • F@st - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    But when AMD libraries make 380X faster than 780Ti, and forcing every DX12 game with Async to cripple competition is nothing wrong according to you, imbecile?
  • prtskg - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link

    Wow! you're well mannered. Do you even know that Nvidia says its hardware is capable to do async compute and they'll release a driver update to enable it? Async compute increases performance all around, if it works. So I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be used.
  • D. Lister - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    I always find it so adorable when AMD fans whine on about Nvidia copyrighting their software features.

    Try to get it through your childlike minds if you can - GPUs are just toys for grownups. If you want to complain about truly unfair copyrights of IPs, there are much higher callings, like pharmaceuticals copyrighting life-saving drugs, or automotive/aeronautical companies copyrighting safety features which, if they were made public, would save many, many more lives.

    Have you simpletons ever wondered why the various world governments don't force these people to make these technologies public? Because then without the potential for profits the big businesses wouldn't have any incentive to invest billions in R&D, and then even the fewer lives that are being saved would be lost.

    'Copyright' gives a developmental incentive. Without it, any research conducted would be extremely slow and disorganized. AMD babbles on about "open standards" because they don't have the budget for in-house development. When they did, they had their own copyrights and others paid them for it. Now, they could get in on Gameworks, but they can't, or won't pay for it. Instead, they impede development done by their competition by making absurd accusations that only the most gullible fanboys would fall for.

    Incidentally, while I believe that all knowledge should be equally shared by all mankind, I also understand that unfortunately collectively, our species simply isn't evolved enough to appreciate the bigger picture, and our currently dominant economics model is FAAAR from being perfect.
  • DiLi - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    "'Copyright' gives a developmental incentive. Without it, any research conducted would be extremely slow and disorganized. "

    Is that why Linux is arguably better and more stable than Windows or Mac? Is that why OpenOffice/LibreOffice can open older and corrupt Word and Excel files better than MS Office? There are many examples in the software world of open-source and "FOSS" being superior to closed source. Yeah, that copyright is really useful in the software industry...
  • D. Lister - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link

    "Is that why Linux is arguably better and more stable than Windows or Mac?"

    Arguably indeed.

    "Is that why OpenOffice/LibreOffice can open older and corrupt Word and Excel files better than MS Office?"

    While these alternatives do offer legacy support for versions that was eventually dropped by MS, they're also quite slow to adopt new features. Secondly, let's not forget that OpenOffice/LibreOffice are here because first there was MS Office. If the aforementioned were really better than MS Office, then they would be the ones dictating standards and MS would be playing catch-up, not the other way around.

    "There are many examples in the software world of open-source and "FOSS" being superior to closed source."

    I'm assuming that you're holding back on the implied salvo for a later retort, because the two examples you've offered so far, are rather lukewarm at best.
  • AVeryLargeObject - Saturday, April 2, 2016 - link

    It is quite amusing seeing Nvidia fanboys protecting a company that gives not a single care about them. I cannot wait to see Nvidia actually make good GPUs, as opposed to crippling old ones to make their new ones look better.

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