nVidia GameWorks - What is it?

Gregster · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:07

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.

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.

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

)

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

andybird123 · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:28

Worth also noting that physx flex has a directcompute version, basically enabling the physx effects that are being added to flex on other vendors

And if this affects performance, you can of course turn it down or off

Gregster · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:32

Good point and very decent of nVidia.

Martini1991 · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:37

Personally I think AC4 maxed out is one of the best looking games out.

But the performance was somewhat disappointing, given 1080p, pretty sure one of my CPU cores was at 100% too.

I'd buy Nvidia, if you know, they offered generic 120HZ 3D support, but somewhat ironically, I had to choose AMD to use my monitors 3D in frame sequential.

andybird123 said:
Worth also noting that physx flex has a directcompute version, basically enabling the physx effects that are being added to flex on other vendors

And if this affects performance, you can of course turn it down or off

But I'm going to make a jumping assumption that this doesn't work on AC4 for an AMD card as of right now?

PhysicsMan94 · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:39

Good thread and thanks for the information. I look forward to GDC 2014 as well to see what else Nvidia is working on and towards

Gregster · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:45

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?

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.

Martini1991 · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:51

If PhysX 4.2 can use DC, then surely that's the hardware accelerated physics problem sorted, so colour me sceptical till I actually see it

eyetrip · 29 Dec 2013 at 13:57

I was going to play the AC games in order.... and only played the first so far... but that video has me downloading Black Flag now!

I have 780 classified sitting here for hours, still in box, because I am finding it hard to justify actually, as my 780 lightning is actually handling everything so well, even at 2560x1440.

If this runs like a dog on one card... well, that box is opening. Unless I can find some other means of justifying it.

Ok, Batman AO with AA and maxed (at 2560x1440 or 3D) is a challenge, but it's as simple as turning down/off AA.

Gregster · 29 Dec 2013 at 20:16

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

Silent_Scone · 29 Dec 2013 at 20:27

Flame works looks mighty impressive

Gregster · 30 Dec 2013 at 09:28

MjFrosty said:
Flame works looks mighty impressive

There is a fair few times in Batman AO that oil drums have fire coming out of them but it looks all pre-rendered but the flames look good. I expect it will be a while before we see the full potential.

eyetrip · 30 Dec 2013 at 09:33

Thanks for bumping this. Was just about to go looking for it to read up on Gameworks, and how it's the death of PC gaming, or some such

PS - that last was a joke, nothing more, nothing less, so please anyone who hates Gameworks, don't pick up on it as as excuse to turn this thread into an argument. We have a thread for that

PPS - Iv'e never had to put a "disclaimer" on a post before

SS-89 · 30 Dec 2013 at 09:43

TBH I'm all for advancement in tech etc. but I am sick of all this proprietary rubbish (AMD included).

One day we can hope that the best features of game engines are available for all gamers.

Gregster · 30 Dec 2013 at 09:50

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.

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)

eyetrip · 30 Dec 2013 at 10:24

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

Awesome stuff.

Hopefully where they are heading will mean this will run well on AMD and Nvidia both.

Was just last night, I had a small "cool" physx moment I think - in Origins, was standing in one place, and noticed his cape was wrapping around him. It just made me think "there must be a window/breeze here" and turned to see that was the case.

A small thing, but still a "cool" moment. And the fog/smoke does do it's little bit for atmosphere.

Nvidia just need to make this more usable on other vendors.

Gregster · 30 Dec 2013 at 10:38

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.

eyetrip · 30 Dec 2013 at 10:44

Gregster said:
but fair play to Nvidia, even the small minority of 3D gamers gets catered for and looked after.

Bless em for that

Now they just need to team up with someone to offer a 30" 2560x1440 IPS passive monitor... or an ultra-wide. Never going to happen though!

It's even turning into a struggle to find a 1080p passive 3D IPS screen now.

pgi947 · 30 Dec 2013 at 11:01

I honestly wouldn't bother trying to play all of the assassins creed games in order, I've played 3 of the older ones, not much besides location changed on the ones I played.

I do have the new one downloading just now so maybe they've changed the game dynamics a bit.

Will also be sure to let you all know how a pair of 780's at 1080 120hz rips through it in 2d and 3d

Martini1991 · 30 Dec 2013 at 11:09

Gregster said:
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.

If it's DC it shouldn't matter what AMD think surely, it should just "work"?
And Nvidia don't really cater to the 3D gamers, hence the lack of generic 120HZ support.

With my 120HZ Active 3D Samsung monitor, an Nvidia card won't work with their 3D Vision because it wants all their crap (Emitter and glasses, which I already have, but Samsung) that's forgetting of course that the Nvidia 3D Vision kit doesn't work with my monitor, and ignoring the fact that Nvidia don't allow Frame sequential with Tridef.

That's not to think I rate AMD for 3D, because it's Tridef developers who are doing it for me.

eyetrip · 30 Dec 2013 at 11:34

Martini1991 said:
If it's DC it shouldn't matter what AMD think surely, it should just "work"?
And Nvidia don't really cater to the 3D gamers, hence the lack of generic 120HZ support.

With my 120HZ Active 3D Samsung monitor, an Nvidia card won't work with their 3D Vision because it wants all their crap (Emitter and glasses, which I already have, but Samsung) that's forgetting of course that the Nvidia 3D Vision kit doesn't work with my monitor, and ignoring the fact that Nvidia don't allow Frame sequential with Tridef.

That's not to think I rate AMD for 3D, because it's Tridef developers who are doing it for me.

Yeah, it's annoying that even with my passive 3D screen, I need to force a specific driver for the only passive 3D "3DVision" monitor they ever released.

It really isn't necessary.

But their 3D support is still very good overall. A bit more painless than using Tridef (which itself is very good from my time with it)

Where I would frequently have to tinker in Tridef, and it could still be touch and go, it's still more a case of "plug and play" with Nvidia and 3D.