I won't argue with you that something needs to change, as it definitely does. It is a vicious circle - and you can draw back to the principles of PC gamers not being a priority with GW technologies.
I don't think for a second that people should beat down NVIDIA to open their tech as that is tyrannical, it's not a common practice in any other walk of development and it shouldn't be here - but as is the natural progression of things, if it truly effected enough people and you included the same percentile of console gamers to the cause, then NVIDIA might not be so aggressive with their practices.
Just a final note on Crysis 2, it was an NVIDIA sponsored title, but the point I was making was; back then GW wasn't in motion, there wasn't any dll libraries that vendors had ready to implement how they wanted - nothing locked out.
All the tessellation in Crysis 2 is driven by Cryteks source code through the conventional DX11 pipeline. They're implementing the tess factors and where they want the tess factors. So you're essentially saying that possibly NVIDIA told them to do this. I'm not sure I buy that, but then it's not as if Crytek didn't sell out.
Like I say, all speculative and it's why the debates are never ending
I am more worried with the fact that more than AMD,its Nvidia users who suffer more when they do these things,since Nvidia has always been the bigger player in the market.
Longterm,all these issues make consoles look better than they should be. It also affects the progression of certain tech - things like physics just end up as party effects on PC versions of the games now.
Yet,the sad thing since consoles are not powerful,the physics effects for them will be implemented more efficiently.
As a result MORE console gamers will actually see these effects than the average PC gamer. Remember,even with Crysis2 it caused problems for people not running top end Nvidia hardware too,and at least AMD users could dial it down a bit even if it was cheating.
Don't believe me?? Look at the benchmarks:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/2/F/299463/original/Dx11-High-1680.png
The GTX460 had far better tessellation performance than a HD6850 but they both crashed in performance. At least the HD6850 users could dial down the tesellation a bit. The GTX460 was a very popular card.
Card sales are declining year on year and Nvidia has been successful since they have been stealing sales from AMD.
But at some point there will be no room left(they get the full market) or AMD bounces back a bit,or Intel ends up getting more and more marketshare overall(their percentage of the overall market is actually increasing as more and more low end discrete cards get replaced by their IGPs). Things like the last few Iris Pro IGPs are increasingly rapidly in performance.
Now ASPs are going up for cards,since people have no choice ATM too,but even that will come to a breaking point.
What will it be like three to four years??
Things like the Batman Fiasco or buggy BF4 don't help the PC platform.
