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Just Cause 2 Gameplay Performance and Image Quality

Yeah, you do kinda go wow when you first run into it, but once your actually playing the game both are passable enough as water that you don't really notice or care. It is nice to see some progress tho.
 
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Wow... water that doesn't even look as good as that in Crysis, a three year old game. Brilliant. CUDA wins!
 
Its good to see the developers making use of high end pc effects, pity Nvidia want it to only run on their cards. ATi have the one up overall tho.
 
What kind of incentive Nvidia gives game developers for such things?
I know for sure that if i was game developer i would want everybody to buy and enjoy my game in its full glory, regardless of what brand of hardware they have. I suppose as long as game devs let such things happen such things will happen.

Or am i thinking completely wrong way about this ?
 
What kind of incentive Nvidia gives game developers for such things?
I know for sure that if i was game developer i would want everybody to buy and enjoy my game in its full glory, regardless of what brand of hardware they have. I suppose as long as game devs let such things happen such things will happen.

Or am i thinking completely wrong way about this ?

Well the reason most of these vendor specific options exist is that the vendor itself provides the engineers to implement it. Nvidia have really good developer relations and driver support teams, so some game developers will take them up on it. ATI are trying to ramp up on this themselves since they have always lacked there due to not having enough money.

When OpenCL/DirectCompute take off and mature we will probably see less and less in the way of ATI/Nvidia 'optimisations', but as it stands there is little incentive at all for developers to spend considerable resources to implement features that only work on the latest and greatest hardware.

If you partner with Nvidia you basically get a free 'ooh' feature for no development cost. Similar thing with PhysX, you get a totally free physics API (Havok has a license fee) and Nvidia will provide engineers to get it implemented.

I'm not saying i support any vendor specific stuff in games, and i certainly DO NOT support intentional crippling, but this is why it happens. It's not that Nvidia bribes developers to use CUDA that were otherwise going to use OpenCL or something, they just add these features that would otherwise not exist at all themselves for marketing.

99% of development time these days is dedicated to the consoles, so developers have no reason to work on all these fancy bleeding edge PC only effects. That's why these programs exist, to get features into the marketpace that will help sell GFX cards.
 
Sums it up nicely IMO.

As it stands for Just Cause 2, gamers without NVIDIA hardware are missing a couple of really nice graphics features, but those features are not critical to the enjoyment of the game. Just Cause 2 still looks just fine and is just as fun without them. But if you want the very best eye candy experience possible, NVIDIA's video cards, especially the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, will give it to you.

When NVIDIA tells us that it will "Do no harm!" when it comes to gaming, that is really a bold faced lie, and we knew it when it was told to us. It will do no harm to PC gaming when it fits its agenda. NVIDIA is going to continue to glom onto its proprietary technologies so that it gains a marketing edge, which it very much does though its TWIMTBP program. And we have to assume that marketing edge is worth all the bad press it does generate. To say NVIDIA does not harm to PC gaming is a delusional at best. You AMD users just got shafted on these cool effects that could have been easily developed for all PC gamers instead of just those that purchase from one company.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/05/04/just_cause_2_gameplay_performance_image_quality/7
 
Well the reason most of these vendor specific options exist is that the vendor itself provides the engineers to implement it. Nvidia have really good developer relations and driver support teams, so some game developers will take them up on it. ATI are trying to ramp up on this themselves since they have always lacked there due to not having enough money.

When OpenCL/DirectCompute take off and mature we will probably see less and less in the way of ATI/Nvidia 'optimisations', but as it stands there is little incentive at all for developers to spend considerable resources to implement features that only work on the latest and greatest hardware.

If you partner with Nvidia you basically get a free 'ooh' feature for no development cost. Similar thing with PhysX, you get a totally free physics API (Havok has a license fee) and Nvidia will provide engineers to get it implemented.

I'm not saying i support any vendor specific stuff in games, and i certainly DO NOT support intentional crippling, but this is why it happens. It's not that Nvidia bribes developers to use CUDA that were otherwise going to use OpenCL or something, they just add these features that would otherwise not exist at all themselves for marketing.

99% of development time these days is dedicated to the consoles, so developers have no reason to work on all these fancy bleeding edge PC only effects. That's why these programs exist, to get features into the marketpace that will help sell GFX cards.

Makes sense, cheers m8
 
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