Huddy on Gameworks round 3

[Gerard]

It seems some are agnostic about Gameworks and Nvidia's motives but that doesn't change the fact that they are terrraforming the game development process in a bad way. Developers should be held accountable for developing games, not taking subsidies to use Nvidia's libraries that removes their responsibility for optimizing said games.

This practice would be unacceptable in other industry but yet somehow with the ample supply of heavy bias it becomes acceptable. I'm of the opinion that developers responsible for their games to their customers and not hide a middleman/middleware in between. Unfortunately the more you buy these games the more you reinforce to the devs and middleman that their plan is working.

Yup, graphics cards companies should stick to making the cards, and not flinging money about to shoehorn specific features into games so they can advertise it as being optimised for their card, or using features that their card has. All the gameworks gimmicks didn't stop the latest batman being an utter turd, and this is a game that had NVidia engineers working on it? You'd think they would have seen the state of the game and advised their higher ups not to be involved with it, but that didn't happen.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

It seems some are agnostic about Gameworks and Nvidia's motives but that doesn't change the fact that they are terrraforming the game development process in a bad way. Developers should be held accountable for developing games, not taking subsidies to use Nvidia's libraries that removes their responsibility for optimizing said games.

Got any sources that show every developer part of TWIMTBP or Gameworks take money from NVIDIA?

Also NO dev is left off the hook because they use any NVIDIA tech, just like NO dev is allowed to do the same using AMD tech.

Bad devs put out bad games, simple. NVIDIA didn't pay Ubisoft to put out absolutely broken rubbish the last 5 years, and they didn't pay Warner brothers to outsource Arkham Knight to Iron Galaxy. It was all the developer's responsibility. Just like simply using tech from Gamework doesn't instantly break a game.

So far the only time I've seen a dev deliberately cut out a feature that works on all hardware as part of a partnership is when Xaviant disabled TressFX 2.0 from running on NVIDIA hardware because of their Gaming Evolved deal with AMD.

 

[D.P.]

I think he means that is what may happen in the future if AMD really starts to struggle to compete. Just look at Intel, we're lucky to get more than 5% increases in performance per generation.

That is mostly down to the complexities of reducing node sizes though and has nothing to do with AMD being effectively M.I.A.


People that make these statements completely mis the fact that even if AMD ceased to exist intel and nvidia both want to sell you new hardware. If intel can make a CPU 50% faster then they would, but they can't. There is no better way to make continued sales than making continuously improving products that are a significant increase in performance. Even prices won't increase at anywhere near the rate you would expect because the price is controlled by the market. Intel/nvidia will want to maximize their profits which means selling products at volumes and price points where a majority of people will purchase - we are basically already at that point with CPUs and GPUs.

 

[eyetrip]

Of course they'll attack NVIDIA when Gameworks drastically lowers the performance of their GPU's, on purpose.

AMD can't really release their own version of gameworks, as NVIDIA has 75%+ of the market share - no developer is going to release closed source AMD features, that rape NVIDIA performance, when NVIDIA has a huge market majority.

Obviously it's the NVIDIA users in this thread and others who'll flock to their beloved GPU vendor and defend them, no matter what.

Just remember that you guys will be part of the reason why NVIDIA will be the sole GPU vendor in the future, and will charge £1000 for each top end GPU, giving 5% more performance, while crippling the previous generation GPU performance via driver updates, all in the name of $$$.

Amd drove me to nvidia, not nvidia.

Amd are responsible for their own mess entirely.

Now they are just behaving like the spoilt brat who's not getting their way.

 

[D.P.]

This is the thing, which the irony comes through. Taking Dave as your example he regularly tarnishes or puts down AMD in the cpu section but doesnt apply his thinking when it comes to processors.

Your quote summed it up. Don't buy AMD then don't expect them to be around forever. The issue with ignoring this is companies like intel and nvidia dominate or have a monopoly.

You just have to accept its a no win situation rooting for the underdog here and only in golden harvest years do they come out with a product that makes the masses switch.

If people were to treat AMD as a charity and buy their products out of some weird sympathy then all it would do is teach AMD to make inferior products and hire more marketing execs to spout PR nonsense like Huddy the "Gaming scientist" spews out. AMD would end up an even more precarious place.besides which that tactic doesn't even work right now, even if you wanted to it is basically impossible to buy a FuryX right now. Should people buy a 390X instead and teach AMD that a rebrand is the way to go?


AMD instead need to learn some real life lessons about product development, technology risk, future analysis, market analytics, marketing and product launch. Jumping on HBM when it clearly wasn't ready has been a costly mistake for AMD

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Bla bla bla, we get it you don't like amd. No matter what the subject is about you always have some anti amd crap to toss into the middle of the discussion. I swear with some of you on here its like some pathetic personal vendetta against a friggin tech company. You don't like their products, don't buy them, doesn't give you an excuse to perpetually be on the whine about it.

I'm not sure if that last bit was referring to mmj_uk or the OP and Huddy?
Or is it ok for one but not the other?

Yup, graphics cards companies should stick to making the cards, and not flinging money about to shoehorn specific features into games so they can advertise it as being optimised for their card, or using features that their card has. All the gameworks gimmicks didn't stop the latest batman being an utter turd, and this is a game that had NVidia engineers working on it? You'd think they would have seen the state of the game and advised their higher ups not to be involved with it, but that didn't happen.

Yeah, bloody graphics card companies, they need to stick to hardware. Next thing you know they'll be coming up with an API or something! Some low level thing that will apparently be responsible for 2 other similar APIs that will all be hyped up and referred to a 'game changers'.
Or they'll release codecs that allow video encoding to be done on the GPU which can be used to record/stream computer game footage.

Maybe we could start a petition to stop this sort of innovation?

 

[D.P.]

I'm not sure if that last bit was referring to mmj_uk or the OP and Huddy?
Or is it ok for one but not the other?



Yeah, bloody graphics card companies, they need to stick to hardware. Next thing you know they'll be coming up with an API or something! Some low level thing that will apparently be responsible for 2 other similar APIs that will all be hyped up and referred to a 'game changers'.
Or they'll release codecs that allow video encoding to be done on the GPU which can be used to record/stream computer game footage.

Maybe we could start a petition to stop this sort of innovation?

I hear AMD's plans are to stop all driver development. Form now on you are expected to program your own drivers because AMD is only going to be making hardware. This explains the lack of AMD driver and fire up deltas in the oats 6 months. They have been testing that approach in Linux for the last 20 years!

 

[andybird123]

Yup, graphics cards companies should stick to making the cards, and not flinging money about to shoehorn specific features into games so they can advertise it as being optimised for their card, or using features that their card has. All the gameworks gimmicks didn't stop the latest batman being an utter turd, and this is a game that had NVidia engineers working on it? You'd think they would have seen the state of the game and advised their higher ups not to be involved with it, but that didn't happen.

No, it didnt, it does now as they are helping fix it.
The publisher has admitted that they palmed the PC port off to an inexperienced and understaffed 3rd party with too tight of a deadline. Not quite sure which part of those three things are nvidia's fault?
The only thing they could have done was go on record as saying they knew it was going to be a problem and have a whinge about the publisher, but that isn't what professional business partners do, sometimes you have to just sit silently by and let that partner, in this case WB, make their own mistakes and then weather the storm that comes after.

 

[Ayahuasca]

Shame Huddy can't try hairworks

 

[Mauller]

http://www.maximumpc.com/amd-mantle-interview-2014/

1. Why would developers want the extra responsibility for maximising performance specifically for AMD hardware when they only own around 20% of the market? and Mantle didn't even support all of their cards...

2. All of the performance benefits AMD promised when Mantle was originally announced failed to appear (except on slow CPU's) but that was just the excuse AMD needed to get gamers onboard so they could push Mantle and shift responsibility for fully optimising their GPU's to developers.

3. Which option would you choose if you were a developer?

Spend lots of extra time porting your DirectX game to Mantle for a tiny percentage of GPU owners and go through extra effort of low level programming which is solely to AMD's benefit.

Or...

Make your game DirectX compatible, do a bit of optimising but ultimately let AMD/NVidia dedicate their own time and money to getting the most out of their own GPU's.

Tough one for a developer/publisher, not!

1. Programmers already take up the so called "Extra responsibility" as their game engines have to perform all the functions of GPU managment for their console ports. And it was stated many times that HD6000 and bellow had fixed function parts which made it unable to use mantle.

2. Mantle did show many performance benefits. but since most tests were performed in single player scenarios which are already draw call optimised, much of the performance advantage did not show so readily on higher end systems.

3. Mantle was going to be open sourced bu amd decided to go down the diplomatic route and hand over the api specs to Chronos, since as everyone knows, nvidia would never take up mantle.

But now we have directx 12 and soon we will have vulkan. So all the supposed "Extra responsibility" as you call it and "time porting" will be irrelevant.

 

[muziqaz]

No, it didnt, it does now as they are helping fix it.
The publisher has admitted that they palmed the PC port off to an inexperienced and understaffed 3rd party with too tight of a deadline. Not quite sure which part of those three things are nvidia's fault?
The only thing they could have done was go on record as saying they knew it was going to be a problem and have a whinge about the publisher, but that isn't what professional business partners do, sometimes you have to just sit silently by and let that partner, in this case WB, make their own mistakes and then weather the storm that comes after.

Man, aren't you all knowing, yet so gullible
So you are saying that nvidia did not involve themselves in Batman PC port development? Well, so which is it when? do they get involved or do they just send the check and drop the gameworks code to devs and leave it at that?
nvidia backers chose one of the possibilities when it is useful to their agenda.
Seeing how half arsed the game came out, I would say nvidia did not involve themselves in optimizing or developing the game, they just wrote a fat check and dropped the gameworks code at the doorstep. Since any self respected company which is not developer, but is 'helping' to bring best experience to its customers(read: nvidia) would have raised red flags all over the place saying that game is literally unplayable. And would have strongly advised WB to delay the game to fix it, since hey nvidia backed games have been in the ****er lately, so one more broken game wouldn't look good, especially in such a state.
Witcher, watchdogs, project cars performance issue I can understand, games are still playable, so no need to push the release date. But how Batman came out it is unacceptable. And those who try not to blame nvidia for this, man you guys are worth every crap you buy from ubisoft and WB, which is broken, keep it up.
There is always 2 sides of the story, and the most ignorant and stupid will chose to believe a single side, especially when that ignorant and stupid does not have knowledge of actual circumstances surrounding these issues.
At the moment all the games with nvidia gameworks came out with some sort of issues (watchdogs, AC:Unity, pcars, batman, witcher, can't comment about far cry 4). I don't think we can chalk gameworks plus these issues as pure coincidence. Isn't there a possibility, that rumor about nvidia bringing their gameworks code very late in development is true?
But hey, I'm not the one to stop you from believing that hairworks AA at x64 is better looking than x16. Or that nvidia is a hero here trying to help to fix the game. oh how honorable of them, no? Or that great news that nvidia helped Microsoft to fix some issues of their OS, though when you read the article it says that nvidia drivers were so messed up, that nvidia had to react and release the fix. Or that lovely news about how Intel helped MS to patch their win 10 OS to stop it draining batteries. Though reading the article itself, it was intel based laptops which had issues, not all...

P.S. does anyone remember when Tomb Raider came out? What did nvidia say? They suggested to their customers to DO NOT buy Tomb Raider till they(nvidia) sorts out tress fx issue. That is so kind of them, isn't it? What did AMD suggest when they are hit buy black box gameworks? They suggest to switch it off, until they sort it out. Do we see the difference in the attitude of the companies?

 

[andybird123]

. Not every game is developed the same way, different devs and studios ask for different levels of help. I can only go by what WB released as official statements.

Not sure what or who else the rest of that rant was aimed at so I'll just steer clear of the fanatical stuff.

P.s. Here is what nvidia actually said about TR;

We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible. Please be advised that these issues cannot be completely resolved by an Nvidia driver. The developer will need to make code changes on their end to fix the issues on GeForce GPUs as well.

"In the meantime, we would like to apologise to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favourite PC games

Sorry, where is the bit about not buying the game? Apart from inside your head.

At the end of the day, whinging about nvidia isn't going to get AMD any extra sales.

 

[mururoa]

Shame Huddy can't try hairworks

 

[N19h7m4r3]

At the end of the day, whinging about nvidia isn't going to get AMD any extra sales.

He's previously admitted he only has experience with one Gameworks game and that's P Cars which he 'accidentally' bought.

He just bases all his opinions on what others have said.

Our opinions also don't matter because we have "super computers"

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28341793&postcount=4205

I only go by what I hear from people who play these games on normal computers. And every gameworks game of recent, starting with ubi**** AC disaster we hear this lovely information on how Gameworks are brought into the game devs attention several months before release. How about Ubisoft Watchdogs? Do we forget that it was AMD title right at the beginning of development, we got these glorious screenshots of super cool graphics. Then at some point game gets pushed half a year, amd is dropped as partner, we receive another game trailer with reduced graphics, and we find out that now it is nVidia title. Somewhere in that period Ubisoft start talking nonsense about AMD, Watchdogs get released with all it's broken bits.

And remember, you have super computer. You look from perspective from which other people can only dream of. So if you don't have any issues, it does not mean no one else doesn't

 

[muziqaz]

He's previously admitted he only has experience with one Gameworks game and that's P Cars which he 'accidentally' bought.

He just bases all his opinions on what others have said.

Our opinions also don't matter because we have "super computers"

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28341793&postcount=4205

so all the people who have issues with gameworks games are just in my head?
The fact is in past year or so all the gamework titles had some issues, while independent games avoided all the controversies. The funny thing is most recent games were blasted not only by AMD by mostly by nvidia gamers as well. But hey you don't have issues with all the games, so the rest of the world is tripping right?

 

[andybird123]

Oh, its THAT guy, explains a lot

 

[Gerard]

No, it didnt, it does now as they are helping fix it.
The publisher has admitted that they palmed the PC port off to an inexperienced and understaffed 3rd party with too tight of a deadline. Not quite sure which part of those three things are nvidia's fault?
The only thing they could have done was go on record as saying they knew it was going to be a problem and have a whinge about the publisher, but that isn't what professional business partners do, sometimes you have to just sit silently by and let that partner, in this case WB, make their own mistakes and then weather the storm that comes after.

Probably the part where NVidia have been waffling about having x amount of staff that go out and help developers with implementing gameworks gimmicks in games. I don't recall saying it was NVidia fault, but the fact is it was promoted as a gameworks title and surely those staff members that were sent out to assist would have seen the half assed state it was in.

Bottom line is it doesn't look good on nvidias part being on the record about helping devs out then a gameworks title actually gets pulled from sales because it was so badly broken. I can't recall many if any other aaa pc games in the last lot of years that actually got withdrawn from sale because they were such a broken pile of crap.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

so all the people who have issues with gameworks games are just in my head?
The fact is in past year or so all the gamework titles had some issues, while independent games avoided all the controversies. The funny thing is most recent games were blasted not only by AMD by mostly by nvidia gamers as well. But hey you don't have issues with all the games, so the rest of the world is tripping right?

Bad developers put out bad games, simple. Go on Steam and nearly every bad game never touched NVIDIA tech. Hell, shall we blame AMD and only AMD for Battlefield 4 and Hardline's bad launch issues as well now? I certainly blame them for making Xaviant disable TressFX in Lichdom because of their Gaming Evolved partnership; but if the game ran like hell I'd blame Xaviant. It's their game, and their responsibility.

Ubisoft is the one in all your examples that was lying about performance, features, and visuals, and they shipped broken games, and tried to force the PC version of Watchdogs to look like console versions by disabling features. Features users then turned back on.

It was also Ubisoft that dropped support and development on Might and Magic X Legacy after 6 months while it still had game breaking bugs; even without it using Gameworks. That's when I stopped supporting them and buying their games. Not a single Ubisoft game in the past 5 years, has ran well on launch on computers without issues.

In the case of Batman it was always Warner Bros, and Rocksteady to blame. Even one of their employees came out to speak against them
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/batman-arkham-knight-pc-problems-were-known-for-mo/1100-6428577/

"I will say that it's pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state," said one unnamed quality assurance tester, which Kotaku claimed had worked on the game.

"It's been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago."

Difficulties developing on new consoles were cited as a major factor in shifting priorities away from the PC version. According to the source, Rocksteady found getting Batman: Arkham Knight to work on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One "impossible for months," which is why "the game got delayed so many times."

"[Rocksteady was] totally unprepared for how hard it was on next-gen consoles," the source stated.

Additionally, Rocksteady didn't want the game's story details to leak, which is why PC testing companies were not used, as is the case in many other multi-platform development projects.

How does this make NVIDIA and their games technology evil? It's the developers themselves, and by extent their publishing company in cases( EA, Warner Brothers, etc).

It makes your arguments against Gameworks even worse after you go and state this "I only go by what I hear from people who play these games on normal computers."

Bottom line is it doesn't look good on nvidias part being on the record about helping devs out then a gameworks title actually gets pulled from sales because it was so badly broken. I can't recall many if any other aaa pc games in the last lot of years that actually got withdrawn from sale because they were such a broken pile of crap.

Two, Final Fantasy 14, and Batman. Each the responsibility of the developers.
The former was so bad the entire team was replaced.
With Batman the same essentially happened; I agree that it looks terrible for NVIDIA to have promoted it. Worse since they make claims of helping devs, which were now proven false as they recently stated they'll be working with Rocksteady to fix it.

 

[gpuerrilla]

Some people will defend nvidia to the hilt Gerard.

 

[andybird123]

Probably the part where NVidia have been waffling about having x amount of staff that go out and help developers with implementing gameworks gimmicks in games. I don't recall saying it was NVidia fault, but the fact is it was promoted as a gameworks title and surely those staff members that were sent out to assist would have seen the half assed state it was in.

Bottom line is it doesn't look good on nvidias part being on the record about helping devs out then a gameworks title actually gets pulled from sales because it was so badly broken. I can't recall many if any other aaa pc games in the last lot of years that actually got withdrawn from sale because they were such a broken pile of crap.

Yeah, but when you sign a cross promotion deal, its not very professional to suddenly turn around and start sniping at your partner. They would burn bridges with publishers if they started doing that, they can help and advise but at the end of the day its the publisher's responsibility to decide what the deadlines are.