AMD and Nvidia have never really seen eye-to-eye on many issues. Nvidia felt that the newest generation of consoles were already outdated, while AMD…well, AMD’s technology was used in the PS4 and Xbox One. To say things are less than agreeable between the two graphics card manufacturers is an understatement.
However, Radeon Graphics’ Robert Hallock – who handles – technical communications believes there’s significant reason to be annoyed about Nvidia Gameworks. Meant as an add-on for Nvidia users and capable of enabling many Nvidia-specific features, Hallock believes it does a great disservice to AMD consumers.
“AMD already makes game-enhancing graphics samples available for free in our public graphics SDK. Mantle was conceived to one day be a public SDK. Keeping this material free and open ensures that gamers can receive code from the developer that’s been vetted against, and optimized for, all industry hardware,” he said to GamingBolt.
“The same cannot be said for Gameworks, which remains a mystery to developers unless they commit to a special license for which there are no public details.”
Hallock brings up some pretty good points. How often is it that AMD users are stuck with a less optimized experience due to preference for Gameworks? “Let’s be very clear: to date, Gameworks code has been forced to run on all graphics vendors – it is not isolated to Nvidia customers. Isn’t it disturbing that all of the Gameworks-enabled titles to date have not offered similar optimizations for AMD Radeon customers and have forced these customers to run code optimized for a different product, often at a penalty?
“That is a disservice to the significant percentage of the gaming public that runs AMD Radeon graphics, and it’s a disservice to the ingenuity of the developers.”
What are your thoughts on Hallock’s stance? Let us know in the comments below.
