The two titan giants of the consumer grade PC GPU industry are at it again, trading blows and smack talking. In the wake of the release of the highly anticipated technical showcase The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, AMD has come out and claimed that by encouraging developers to use GameWorks (including HairWorks) technology, which includes proprietary code for things such as HairWorks and HBAO+, Nvidia is deliberately making it difficult for AMD to make sure their cards and drivers are optimized for the newest releases- since they cannot gain access to proprietary technology.
Nvidia, however, has responded indignantly, claiming that the problem lies with the performance of AMD products, and nothing else.
“We are not asking game developers do anything unethical.
GameWorks improves the visual quality of games running on GeForce for our customers. It does not impair performance on competing hardware.
Demanding source code access to all our cool technology is an attempt to deflect their performance issues. Giving away your IP, your source code, is uncommon for anyone in the industry, including middleware providers and game developers. Most of the time we optimize games based on binary builds, not source code.
GameWorks licenses follow standard industry practice. GameWorks source code is provided to developers that request it under license, but they can’t redistribute our source code to anyone who does not have a license.
The bottom line is AMD’s tessellation performance is not very good and there is not a lot NVIDIA can/should do about it. Using DX11 tessellation has sound technical reasoning behind it, it helps to keep the GPU memory footprint small so multiple characters can use hair and fur at the same time.
I believe it is a resource issue. NVIDIA spent a lot of artist and engineering resources to help make Witcher 3 better. I would assume that AMD could have done the same thing because our agreements with developers don’t prevent them from working with other IHVs. (See also, Project Cars)
I think gamers want better hair, better fur, better lighting, better shadows and better effects in their games. GameWorks gives them that.”
I’m not quite sure whose side to take on this entire issue- still, it appears that the community, at least, has decided to take matters into its own hands, as it is now possible to enable GameWorks even on AMD cards, without taking a performance hit.
Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.