Interview: AMD on Game Development and DX11

[Final8y]

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/interviews/2010/01/06/interview-amd-on-game-development-and-dx11/1

 

[Rroff]

[Nvidia] put PhsyX in there, and that's the one I've got a reasonable amount of respect for. Even though I don't think PhysX - a proprietary standard - is the right way to go, despite Nvidia touting it as an "open standard" and how it would be "more than happy to license it to AMD", but [Nvidia] won't. It's just not true! You know the way it is, it's simply something [Nvidia] would not do and they can publically say that as often as it likes and know that it won't, because we've actually had quiet conversations with them and they've made it abundantly clear that we can go whistle.

While I agree... I think AMD/ATI could have made more effort openly to court physx... then atleast if nVidia did shut them out they could be publicly shamed for it... they keep going on about how they made quiet efforts... really they made no effort at all and just assume rightly or wrongly nVidia's stance - probably rightly.

The part that I totally hold in contempt is the appalling way they added MSAA support that uses standard DirectX calls - absolutely nothing which is proprietary in any useful sense. They just did ordinary stuff, a completely standard recommendation that they make and that we make to developers for how to do MSAA, and they put it in and locked it to their hardware knowing it would run just fine on our hardware. And indeed, if you simply spoof the vendor ID in the driver - which we and other people have documented - it runs absolutely fine on AMD hardware. There's nothing proprietary about it in that sense, nothing new. I think that's exceptionally poor.

While on the face of it hes right when things were investigated in more detail it appears that ~90% of the MSAA code is infact a standard implementation... also ~90% of the code IS running on ATI cards anyway - its only the final resolve thats customised for nVidia cards - and happens to work (apparently) on ATI cards - that is locked out... there is NOTHING to stop ATI providing their own tested solution for the final AA resolve.

 

[Rroff]

RH: No, definitely not because I think it's nice to have a decent chunk of horsepower available to you locally - that can make a big difference, particularly if you are in something which is a twitchy game where 100th of a second counts. I don't think we'll go completely to cloud computing in one generation, but we'll have more access to it in the next generation. The Onlive stuff was an interesting route to go.

I'll give him credit for picking up on this tho.

It's not about shutting people out to us, it's about innovation - doing it first and doing it well.

I had to laugh at that comment...

bit-tech: IF - given we don't know yet - when Nvidia's Fermi cards finally arrive they are faster than your HD 5970-

RH: -Well if it's not faster and it's 50 per cent bigger, then they've done something wrong

lol interesting comment



2 things stick out for me from reading this - they do seem to be starting to take developer relations seriously... but its still a focus purely on the titles that are gonna end up in reviews or triple A they don't seem very interested in smaller projects.

EDIT: Oh and I like him a little better for the comments on intel/Larrabee - looks like he realises some of the things I've been saying about their approach too - not many people get it.

 

[Broken Hope]

While on the face of it hes right when things were investigated in more detail it appears that ~90% of the MSAA code is infact a standard implementation... also ~90% of the code IS running on ATI cards anyway - its only the final resolve thats customised for nVidia cards - and happens to work (apparently) on ATI cards - that is locked out... there is NOTHING to stop ATI providing their own tested solution for the final AA resolve.

Without the resolve nothing actually gets AAed so ATI cards are doing all the work for AA but nothing is actually shown, so basically they get worked just as hard for no gain? Way to go.

Also by the time ATI get their own AA implementation in no one will even care about the game anymore.

 

[drunkenmaster]

While I agree... I think AMD/ATI could have made more effort openly to court physx... then atleast if nVidia did shut them out they could be publicly shamed for it... they keep going on about how they made quiet efforts... really they made no effort at all and just assume rightly or wrongly nVidia's stance - probably rightly.



While on the face of it hes right when things were investigated in more detail it appears that ~90% of the MSAA code is infact a standard implementation... also ~90% of the code IS running on ATI cards anyway - its only the final resolve thats customised for nVidia cards - and happens to work (apparently) on ATI cards - that is locked out... there is NOTHING to stop ATI providing their own tested solution for the final AA resolve.

HEre we go again, firstly your first response, you simply don't understand business. You don't publically go around shouting you want Physx, because Nvidia can publically say "no you can't have Physx, on and by the way everyone out there in the public, clearly Physx is great, AMD were begging us to have it, but they can't only we have it and clearly its great as they want it".

Its business 101, you don't publically ask for things you know you won't get as it just lets the other side laugh at you and claim how desparately they need it, even if thats not true thats how it would appear.

AS for the second thing, its just wrong, the code is nothing new, again we know this because that very method of doing AA was used in other titles based on the same engine, everyone but you can agree that its VERY clear Nvidia paid the company to simply not let the perfectly normal code run on ATi hardware. They took the usual code that has done this exact AA in many games, added a few probably void calls to nothing, add a few lines of code that do nothing, call it Nvidia proprietary code and claim it as their own, add the ATi locking out code and pay the company to not allow AMD to do anything about it.

You can say what you want about AMD doing their own thing, except, they weren't allowed to clearly, the Code AMD cards usually use for AA in UT3 games is right there, locked out with a company thats taken money and very obviously been asked to not help out AMD in any way. Pretty much the entire world excepts this except you.

 

[Duran]

HEre we go again, firstly your first response, you simply don't understand business. You don't publically go around shouting you want Physx, because Nvidia can publically say "no you can't have Physx, on and by the way everyone out there in the public, clearly Physx is great, AMD were begging us to have it, but they can't only we have it and clearly its great as they want it".

Its business 101, you don't publically ask for things you know you won't get as it just lets the other side laugh at you and claim how desparately they need it, even if thats not true thats how it would appear.

AS for the second thing, its just wrong, the code is nothing new, again we know this because that very method of doing AA was used in other titles based on the same engine, everyone but you can agree that its VERY clear Nvidia paid the company to simply not let the perfectly normal code run on ATi hardware. They took the usual code that has done this exact AA in many games, added a few probably void calls to nothing, add a few lines of code that do nothing, call it Nvidia proprietary code and claim it as their own, add the ATi locking out code and pay the company to not allow AMD to do anything about it.

You can say what you want about AMD doing their own thing, except, they weren't allowed to clearly, the Code AMD cards usually use for AA in UT3 games is right there, locked out with a company thats taken money and very obviously been asked to not help out AMD in any way. Pretty much the entire world excepts this except you.

Nvidia would never deny ati the licensing or they would face a series of anti-trust law suits. you are pretty clueless and delusional if you think you can deny sth like that in the today's business world. the truth is they never made any serious effort. your little theory is at best laughable too.

What nvidia did is not a good thing but its business. On the other hand, Ati forced/paid codemasters to remove sli support from Dirt 2 final product even if it was present at the demo. Dirt 2 simply doesnt support sli atm from its core. Of course its ati and no one in this particular forum talks about it.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Nvidia would never deny ati the licensing or they would face a series of anti-trust law suits. you are pretty clueless and delusional if you think you can deny sth like that in the today's business world. the truth is they never made any serious effort. your little theory is at best laughable too.

What nvidia did is not a good thing but its business. On the other, Ati forced/paid codemasters to remove sli support from Dirt 2 final product even if it was present at the demo. Dirt 2 simply doesnt support sli atm from its core. Of course its ati and no one in this particular forum talks about it.

Nonsense, that is simply complete twaddle and again you don't understand business, there is entirely nothing anti-trust about this for one thing, its not a requirement, not having the licence doesn't stop AMD competing, the fact that Nvidia have locked out physx working with an ATI card in the system proves it. AMD have neither sued Nvidia for that, nor could they, its not anti competition, its just moronic. If denying a licence for something proprietary was illegal, well, Nvidia would be making x86 cpu's already, and frankly they'd be producing i7's, and Intel chipsets, and 5870's, and AMD would be making i7's, and Intel would be making ATh 2 X4's, 5870's, 4870's and AMD intergrated gpu's in their own chipsets. You're idea that someone can't refuse another company a licence to use something it owns is well, you can call my idea laughable, but I don't know what the hell that makes your idea.

THe world revolves around people being able to licence whatever they make to whoever they want.... the fact you think otherwise has you soooo close to being the 2nd ever person on my ignore list.

As for Dirt 2 not supporting SLI, i call twaddle on that too, I could be wrong, but I don't see it, neither do I see the big threads on AMD paying someone to remove nor do I see Nvidia posturing about it nor mentioning anywhere, nor Fud talking about it, nor anyone, because it didn't happen.

The biggest thing in the interview, which naturally Rroff didn't mention was the utter piece of crap that was Stalker being released as a buggy pile of poo as a Nvidia the way its meant to be played title. Then AMD took over, it got patched, several key things were added, it became far less buggy, it got faster and it got better and it got updates to better dx versions which improved speed also. Awful under Nvidia, great with AMD support.

Rroff's whole argument is whoever he works with on whatever he works with gets great support from Nvidia, so AMD must be crap with helping developers. AS they said, Nvidia are simply a loud company that can't not market anything ever. Just because AMD don't go around bragging about every last thing every 3 minutes doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

He also seems to forget that, most games work just fine, on both hardware, smaller games get less love from Nvidia aswell, you focus your manpower and you focus it where its needed. Bleeding edge titles push the boundries, do new things, often have the newest and hardest pushing engines and need the most work to get working, both companies should and DO focus their efforts on triple a titles first, the AA, then less the further you go down, not sure how thats bad.

EDIT:- having done a quick search I can see there is a problem with SLI in dirt 2 and only the full game. I admit it also looks dodgey and IF it ever came out AMD did pay them to screw it I'd be the first to say, while a retaliation its something I would be disgusted with.... however. Nvidia isn't allowing AA to be fixed for AMD in Batman, still, months later, theres a patch from Codemaster for sli coming out shortly, not exactly the same. Nor has Nvidia publically accused AMD, nor has anyone even hinted anywhere officially, bar a few people on forums, that anythings been done deliberately. If Nvidia suspected, after all the Batman nonsense they'd be out there shouting from the hill tops, and they aren't are they.

LIkewise this is NOT the first title where a full game has not supported SLI, nor xfire, from the get go. Just because it worked in specific maps in the demo doesn't mean it can't be removed due to huge bugs in area's not in the demo. LIkewise Borderlands, a TWIMTBP game shipped without SLI support, was that AMD's fault aswell, or the numerous other titles, like Crysis, another TWIMTBP game that shipped without sli support?

Or is is simply that sli and most definately xfire often have issues as games are launched, and often times both companies get them fixed very quickly and yes, very often it will be the less involved game developer who has the bigger issues, none of that is new. According to Rroff, Nvidia should have been heavily involved with Dirt 2, just because its a TWIMTBP game doesn't stop AMD getting full support, they just don't want to according to Rroff, so is this just Nvidia not bothering? No I don't think that either, its further down the line in support because it is a flagship dx11 title they have no interest in. But this is a simple SLi bug thats happened countless times(as with xfire, not singling Nvidia out) over the years. ANything else missing(that Nvidia support) from the game with a single card? no? ok then.

 

[Andric]

Liked this :

What I could have done as the Developer Relations guy at AMD is say "actually, what they're doing is a reasonable business investment and I'll do exactly the same thing for all the DirectX 11 code we are adding. We'll just go in an add it, and since I can't QA it on Fermi because all they've got still is a faked up board that they showed off recently, what I'll do is I'll lock it to our hardware." Morally I think that would be reprehensible, but from a business point of view I could argue in favour of it, but we think it's really the wrong thing to do and we've not locked a single line of DirectX 11 code. That's the difference in the way [AMD] works - we work through enablement and open standards. [Nvidia] works through closed standards and disablement, which, to me is inexcusable; it's as bad as that

 

[Duran]

Nonsense, that is simply complete twaddle and again you don't understand business, there is entirely nothing anti-trust about this for one thing, its not a requirement, not having the licence doesn't stop AMD competing, the fact that Nvidia have locked out physx working with an ATI card in the system proves it. AMD have neither sued Nvidia for that, nor could they, its not anti competition, its just moronic. If denying a licence for something proprietary was illegal, well, Nvidia would be making x86 cpu's already, and frankly they'd be producing i7's, and Intel chipsets, and 5870's, and AMD would be making i7's, and Intel would be making ATh 2 X4's, 5870's, 4870's and AMD intergrated gpu's in their own chipsets. You're idea that someone can't refuse another company a licence to use something it owns is well, you can call my idea laughable, but I don't know what the hell that makes your idea.

THe world revolves around people being able to licence whatever they make to whoever they want.... the fact you think otherwise has you soooo close to being the 2nd ever person on my ignore list.

As for Dirt 2 not supporting SLI, i call twaddle on that too, I could be wrong, but I don't see it, neither do I see the big threads on AMD paying someone to remove nor do I see Nvidia posturing about it nor mentioning anywhere, nor Fud talking about it, nor anyone, because it didn't happen.

The biggest thing in the interview, which naturally Rroff didn't mention was the utter piece of crap that was Stalker being released as a buggy pile of poo as a Nvidia the way its meant to be played title. Then AMD took over, it got patched, several key things were added, it became far less buggy, it got faster and it got better and it got updates to better dx versions which improved speed also. Awful under Nvidia, great with AMD support.

Rroff's whole argument is whoever he works with on whatever he works with gets great support from Nvidia, so AMD must be crap with helping developers. AS they said, Nvidia are simply a loud company that can't not market anything ever. Just because AMD don't go around bragging about every last thing every 3 minutes doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

He also seems to forget that, most games work just fine, on both hardware, smaller games get less love from Nvidia aswell, you focus your manpower and you focus it where its needed. Bleeding edge titles push the boundries, do new things, often have the newest and hardest pushing engines and need the most work to get working, both companies should and DO focus their efforts on triple a titles first, the AA, then less the further you go down, not sure how thats bad.

http://community.codemasters.com/fo...-1317/401137-sli-please-codies-some-news.html
if you want more threads look for yourself. Nvidia is not like ati so they will not go crying around to make themselves look like the good guys. smaller games get less support? yeah games like Cryostasis, Mirrors edge, the dark void are all bigger blockbusters than Modern warfare 2.

Nvidia has openly claimed physx to be open for licensing and they cant suddenly deny it to ati.

Another laughable comment from you regarding stalker series. The original Stalker is the most critically acclaimed of the series and the release with the least bugs that the community loved to work with. Ati took over added pointless graphics features and made Clear sky which was simply unplayable at the beginning and ran worse than Crysis. Even after more than 5 patches and immense efforts from the community Stalker Clear sky is still full of bugs and crap performance. On the other hand Stalker SOC with mods has great graphics with much better performance and its considered as a classic. Clearly... Good job ati!

 

[Rroff]

Without the resolve nothing actually gets AAed so ATI cards are doing all the work for AA but nothing is actually shown, so basically they get worked just as hard for no gain? Way to go.

Also by the time ATI get their own AA implementation in no one will even care about the game anymore.

That is indeed what is happening. nVidia claim its so that other developers can step in minimum fuss - ATI claim its nVidia trying to sabotage their performance... both seem equally likely.

 

[Baboonanza]

Nvidia has openly claimed physx to be open for licensing and they cant suddenly deny it to ati.

Yes they can. Also there is the old gambit of saying 'we will happily license this technology to anyone' and then offering licensing terms that you know will be unacceptable to the other side. For instance demanding royalties on every ATi card sold.

At the end of the day this is still he-said-she-said though. I can see why ATi would think that creating their own open standard would be better than almost any deal with Nvidia. After all, physics acceleration isn't really a 'must-have feature' yet so they have the time.

Another laughable comment from you regarding stalker series. The original Stalker is the most critically acclaimed of the series and the release with the least bugs that the community loved to work with. Ati took over added pointless graphics features and made Clear sky which was simply unplayable at the beginning and ran worse than Crysis. Even after more than 5 patches and immense efforts from the community Stalker Clear sky is still full of bugs and crap performance. On the other hand Stalker SOC with mods has great graphics with much better performance and its considered as a classic. Clearly... Good job ati!

Oh please. His argument wasn't particularly good, yours is just idiotic. ATi are not responsible for the content of the game - it was the devs who messed that up - and a large amount of the bugginess wouldn't be directly related to graphics anyway. I'm sure ATi helped with some aspects of the improvements but games getting less buggy when given patches and more dev time is not exactly unusual is it?

 

[Rroff]

HEre we go again, firstly your first response, you simply don't understand business. You don't publically go around shouting you want Physx, because Nvidia can publically say "no you can't have Physx, on and by the way everyone out there in the public, clearly Physx is great, AMD were begging us to have it, but they can't only we have it and clearly its great as they want it".

Its business 101, you don't publically ask for things you know you won't get as it just lets the other side laugh at you and claim how desparately they need it, even if thats not true thats how it would appear.

AS for the second thing, its just wrong, the code is nothing new, again we know this because that very method of doing AA was used in other titles based on the same engine, everyone but you can agree that its VERY clear Nvidia paid the company to simply not let the perfectly normal code run on ATi hardware. They took the usual code that has done this exact AA in many games, added a few probably void calls to nothing, add a few lines of code that do nothing, call it Nvidia proprietary code and claim it as their own, add the ATi locking out code and pay the company to not allow AMD to do anything about it.

You can say what you want about AMD doing their own thing, except, they weren't allowed to clearly, the Code AMD cards usually use for AA in UT3 games is right there, locked out with a company thats taken money and very obviously been asked to not help out AMD in any way. Pretty much the entire world excepts this except you.

Actually my (real world) track record would suggest I do understand business...

You don't just go sucking upto a company publicly as your suggesting as the wrong way... the fact they apparently want their tech out there and used gives you leverage... you tactically negotiate on your terms... you only end up being laughed at when they pull out if you don't understand business.

As for the second bit... majority != right unless they are welding bigger sticks... the rest of the world can accept something because thats what they want to believe if they like... I'll stick to reality.

 

[Mr Paul]

The other thing is that all these CPU cores we have are underutilised and I'm going to take another pop at Nvidia here. When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multicore implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. That's pretty shabby! I wonder why Nvidia has done that? I wonder why Nvidia has failed to do all their QA on stuff they don't care about - making it run efficiently on CPU cores - because the company doesn't care about the consumer experience it just cares about selling you more graphics cards by coding it so the GPU appears faster than the CPU.

It's the same thing as Intel's old compiler tricks that it used to do; Nvidia simply takes out all the multicore optimisations in PhysX. In fact, if coded well, the CPU can tackle most of the physics situations presented to it. The emphasis we're seeing on GPU physics is an over-emphasis that comes from one company having GPU physics... promoting PhysX as if it's Gods answer to all physics problems, when actually it's more a solution in search of problems.

I suspected as much.

 

[Rroff]

the Code AMD cards usually use for AA in UT3 games is right there, locked out with a company thats taken money and very obviously been asked to not help out AMD in any way. Pretty much the entire world excepts this except you.

Direct quotes from Mark Rein state that there is no AA code of any sort in the version of the engine shipped to licensees like Eidos/Rocksteady.

 

[Rroff]

I suspected as much.

Yeah that sucks... the nVidia demos from early builds showed a 3.6gig Q6600 to be between 4 and 20 times slower depending on what you were doing - later builds is mysteriously became upto 60 times slower on the CPU to do the same thing.

Doesn't change the fact tho that no CPU we have out in the immediate future could be used to do fluid dynamics, advanced cloth effects, etc. at decent real time framerates - when the GPU can.


EDIT: I disagree with the last bit about being a solution in search of problems... a lot of developers - specially those who license middleware/off the shelf solutions and don't have the resources to build a physics solver from scratch - are bumping into the limits of CPU physics - especially with a general purpose API.

 

[Broken Hope]

Direct quotes from Mark Rein state that there is no AA code of any sort in the version of the engine shipped to licensees like Eidos/Rocksteady.

Right the engine doesn't ship with AA support out of the box, but the method that Nvidia is using and has locked to only their cards is using standard DX code that works just fine on ATI hardware.

 

[jigger]

Very interesting read. Huddy is a true legend.

 

[Rroff]

Right the engine doesn't ship with AA support out of the box, but the method that Nvidia is using and has locked to only their cards is using standard DX code that works just fine on ATI hardware.

Which when it came down to it - as RH states in the interview... most of the code was infact using standard functionality and is running on non-nVidia hardware - its just the very last part of the pipeline that was tweaked and tested for nVidia hardware and "locked" out.

Anyone who has a problem with that doesn't really understand how software development works.

 

[Rroff]

Very interesting read. Huddy is a true legend.

I dunno about that... he talks a lot of sense about some things - and obviously has a very good understanding of some aspects - but theres also a lot of hollow statements if you step back a bit... talk is cheap actions speak louder.

 

[Final8y]

I dunno about that... he talks a lot of sense about some things - and obviously has a very good understanding of some aspects - but theres also a lot of hollow statements if you step back a bit... talk is cheap actions speak louder.

LOL.