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nVidia GameWorks - What is it?

Gregster

Gregster

Gregster

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Recently, I watched the Montreal conference from Nvidia and was blown away by some of the tech but thought we wouldn't be seeing any of it, as tech demo's generally don't make their way to games (or at least not that quickly), so I have been doing some reading up and I am very impressed. Check out this Assassins Creed IV demo, showing off some of what Nvidias new libraries bring to gamers.

Watch in 1080P for the best quality on these stunning features.

Some of the season’s most anticipated PC games have been built with technology developed by NVIDIA.

We have a proud heritage on the PC platform, delivering amazing performance and advanced technologies for gamers. Technologies developed as part of our “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” program are among the most deployed in the industry.

Hitting hard:
Hitting hard: “Batman: Arkham Origins.”
To keep the momentum going, we’re expanding “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” – which represents our promise to gamers and developers to make the best game experience possible – with an effort we call GameWorks.

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag,” “Batman: Arkham Origins,” and “Call of Duty: Ghosts”are among the new titles built with the help of NVIDIA’s GameWorks program.

We’re announcing a special holiday game bundle. Starting October 28, when you buy our GeForce GTX 660 or GTX 760 you get a free copy of “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” and “Splinter Cell Blacklist.” Buy a GTX 770, GTX 780 or GTX TITAN, and we’ll also include a free copy of “Batman: Arkham Origins.”

But that’s not all. To celebrate the production release of PC game streaming to SHIELD, we’re also offering $50-$100 off the purchase of an NVIDIA SHIELD with your GTX purchase.

This promotion represents our commitment to the PC platform, one we’re extending and expanding with our investment in GameWorks.
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That is a couple of months old but it is clear to anyone, nVidia are not resting on their laurels and with over 300 devs working alongside our favourite game developers, I expect to see much more in the TWIMTBP future. If anyone thinks nVidia isn't out to make gaming a great experience, loking at this and previous nVidia techs, they would be mistaken.

We’ve dispatched our engineers to work onsite with top game developers and add effects, tweak performance, fix bugs, and train developers in open standards and work hand-in-hand with our game laboratory.

Here’s a taste of what our team has helped accomplish:

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” will feature God Rays, which allow game makers to paint beams of light that illuminate a scene from above; horizon-based ambient occlusion + (HBAO+) for more detailed and realistic shadows around objects that obstruct rays of light; percentage-closer soft shadows (PCSS) for more lifelike contact hardening shadows; and temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA) for smoother edges.
“Batman: Arkham Origins” is built with support for GPU PhysX for realistic turbulence, particle and cloth effects, NVIDIA Bokeh & Depth of Field technologies for cool camera effects, HBAO+, PCSS, and TXAA.
“Call of Duty: Ghosts” will feature GPU PhysX for more realistic turbulence and particle effects, TXAA, and HBAO+.
As gamers, we couldn’t be prouder of our contribution to these titles. They represent still more reasons why our “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” signature will continue to represent industry leadership and unmatched technical excellence.
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http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/10/17/twimtbp/

Well worth a read.

GameWorks includes things like:

Flex - Which is a unified GPU PhysX system, which basically means, they can use rigid body and fluid simulations together.

GIWorks - Global illumination for real time lighting effects. This adds more realism to lightning and allows several lights to be used and run independantly, which has always been hard and problematic in the past (apparently :D)

FlameWorks - My personal favourite and made me look in awe at the tech demo. This gives and to coin a phrase "Movie style flames and smoke effects" The Montreal demo looked stunning and I had to get it again, so here it is.


I would love to see this in real time and hope to see it make an appearance in game soon :)

There is many more things to GameWorks but these 3 things are just scratching the surface. It looks like Nvidia are investing the extra cost for our GPU's wisely :p
 
Martini1991 said:
But I'm going to make a jumping assumption that this doesn't work on AC4 for an AMD card as of right now?
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I know it was said a while back that the PhysX SDK (4.2 I think) would be able to use a DC version but not read anything since but it is coming.
 
I stopped my download last night and forgot to restart it :(

I was so looking forward to playing this in 2D and then a blast in 3D. Oh well, I am off for 6 days and looks worth it to me :)
 
Nvidia may not be that popular here but they put a massive amount of effort into gaming and this shows their commitment isn't slowing.

In answer to the DC version of PhysX -

PhysXInfo.com: Is FLEX purely GPU accelerated library, or will it support CPU execution? Is it plausible to see FLEX ported to OpenCL or DirectCompute?

Miles Macklin: Right now we have a CUDA implementation and a DirectCompute implementation is planned. We are considering a CPU implementation.

I have also built FLEX for Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 64bit) and it works great, in some cases it is faster than Windows.
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http://physxinfo.com/news/11860/introducing-nvidia-flex-unified-gpu-physx-solver/

And a teaser of what Flex can do (part of GameWorks of course)

 
I am far from a fan of proprietary tech and Nvidia do like to lock things down but with the new PhysX SDK, there is no reason at all PhysX can't work on other vendors. The problem is, AMD Roy has lambasted PhysX and said nobody wants it, so I can't see AMD taking it up.

The same goes for 3D, AMD's PR's claimed that 3D is dead and nobody wants it but fair play to Nvidia, even the small minority of 3D gamers gets catered for and looked after.
 
MjFrosty said:
Batman AO physX are fairly basic in fairness, I found that Arkham Asylum used more effects!
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I have all 3 Batman games but not played the previous 2 in forever in truth and Like Eyetrip, I just seem to be putting so many games on the back burner. I will get round to these though and hoping they are as good as my memory remembered :)

I am loving AC4. It does feel a little sluggish now and then, so will fire up FRAPS to see if I need some more grunt.
 
No Paul, no 120Hz option. I hope 3D works ok. I will report back ohhhh and very Jelly of those speeds. It took me 13 hours to download :(
 
pgi947 said:
Show off :o

Game runs strangely, regular dips into the 30's and the game engine is locked at 60fps so 120hz mod does nothing
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I modded my ini file for 120Hz and now an option but still only runs at 60fps with the same dips. Now I know why it felt sluggish :(

Good ol UBIsoft :mad:
 
pgi947 said:
I've given up now, a random stuttery mess, reminds me so much of how Far Cry 3 used to play. I'll revisit it again in 6 months.

The frame drops aren't even related to anything special happening on screen, walking through Havana, one foot step will be 60fps, the next 33fps. I suppose it will make a good advert for GSync :p

Edit: Seemingly it will run at a smooth straight 60fps on a 290x, maybe the Gameworks conspiracy theorists missed that part?
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It has been playable and nothing putting me off but I know what you mean. It does feel sluggish and input lag is very noticeable at times. I will also leave this on the back burner for a bit and hopefully 3D will be working. How they rate it as 'Good' is beyond me. They need a 'Has Potential' rating.
 
humbug said:
Shame its proprietary, i can't devs out side of those already using Nvidia proprietary Libraries taking this up, so use of it will be just as limited as PhysX, whats more i don't see anything new. looks like a lot of Nvidia noise over something already done.
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Did you actually read it?
 
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