The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was optimized for Nvidia cards, and uses their GameWorks technology heavily. That’s all well and good, but apparently, enabling any of those special features leads to massive performance losses for AMD card users, to the point that AMD has come out and alleged that Nvidia deliberately tried to sabotage performance.

Speaking more about the issue, John Taylor, Global Corporate Marketing at AMD, and Robert Hallock, Global Technical Marketing at AMD, discussed how they were at a disadvantage, since they could never have access to the full code to optimize their cards for the game, and how Nvidia’s approach allegedly varies greatly from AMD’s own.

“When you bring up an effect like TressFX or Hairworks, you built it into a tech demo first, to show people that ‘hey, it’s viable’.  That it works, that it looks good. But those technologies don’t start appearing in the game builds until many years later.

“And certain builds might be about doing certain optimizations, certain features might not be in certain builds, so you can’t take a stagecraft or what is demoed and apply to… well since it was demoed in this year and in this month, that means AMD has had all that time to be working with the developer on that code.”

They discussed how Nvidia’s approach was, in their opinion, unnecessarily hostile.

“Well there is nothing wrong optimizing the performance of a title for your hardware, that happens all the time. You know the issue is, I think, how this optimization is done. You can do it in a way that… there is certain baseline average and your performance rises above that level, or you can do it in a way where you bring the baseline down and you bring up your level to create this artificial gap. And it doesn’t have to be that way, right? You can do the optimization in a way that benefits your customers without harming millions of other people too. And that’s the argument that we are making in our position here. “

On the whole, I am still not sure who is right and who is wrong in the situation here. I just know that this kind of fractured PC market goes against everything that the PC as a platform stands for, so I do hope that issues like these are resolved sooner rather than later.

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.