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Requires minor tessellation tweak to prevent Nvidia HairWorks tanking FPS.
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Requires minor tessellation tweak to prevent Nvidia HairWorks tanking FPS.
So a driver fix... for a game that was developed for 2 out of 3 systems on AMD kit... blame Nvidia... blame CDPR... blame everyone but...
(and way to ignore the rebuttal from Slightly Mad Studios in reference to the allegations made against them in your above link)
I think people are also unhappy about its relatively poor performance on Nvidia cards previous to Maxwell too.
For example the 960 seems to be handily beating the 780. In fact, looking at some benchmarks myself, Kepler seems to fare worse than AMD (at least with HairWorks off)!
WRT AMD performance - how exactly are AMD supposed to get driver patches out when their access to the game is restricted until release, and even then still limited? That's what the controversy is about.
The same issues were more or less there when the last Tomb Raider was released, with the heavy emphasis on tessellation. And that surely wasn't an Nvidia created problem.Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled
And Nvidia hasn't even released a game ready driver for the Fermi family.
The problem, to me, seems to be that people want to watch a movie, with animated characters that look so close to lifelike as to be next to impossible to distinguish, and they want to do it on a computer, where they manipulate everything. And for as good as computers are these days, they still aren't that good. At least not for everyone.
From my understanding cards that aren't very good at tessellation suffer the most, something I'm lead to believe cards before the GTX 680 aren't good at and all AMD cards aren't good at.
CDPR could have included TressFX if they wanted just like Grand Theft Auto V includes tech from both companies, they could have AMD GPUs use less tessellation.
AFAIK nothing prevented CDPR from working with AMD, its agreements with Nvidia didn't prevent them from working with AMD or any other company to implement its own tech or to optimise it for their hardware, you only have to look at the situation with drivers to see how many resources each company is dedicating to development.
AMD hasn't released a WHQL driver for six months, Nvidia release WHQL drivers on an almost monthly basis.
We seem to be going down the route where just like XBOX and PS , you have to have both nVIDIA and ATiAMD graphics cards in the same PC in the future to play the separate games supported by each card.
Tesselation doesn't appear to be the (sole) issue; as I said Kepler performs badly even though it's performs largely the same as Maxwell WRT tesselation. And the newer GCN cards significantly lifted performance, Hawaii then again in Tonga, but if a game is hitting a performance wall with tesselation in the first place then it's probably just squandering resources on it to make certain hardware appear better e.g. Crysis 2 concrete/Batman cape before patches.
There are restrictions with what AMD can see with Gameworks; developers are forbidden from disclosing information to AMD about the libraries. On the flip side, the source code for AMD's equivalent libraries generally is available, hence AMD will theoretically have a much harder time attempting to optimise for the games/libraries retroactively than Nvidia who could have far more access even before release.
AMD used to release WHQL drivers on a monthly basis, then decided to change that and release them when necessary. There have also been non-WHQL drivers in the meantime, which just means they weren't submitted for qualification. But they're still perfectly usable.
When AMD released on a fixed schedule it was a bad thing. Now they're releasing them as-required like Nvidia, it's also a bad thing. :rolleyes:
However, as I said in my first post, performance doesn't seem all that bad on AMD without Hairworks. Pre-Maxwell nVidia OTOH...
Follow-up question. One for which I don't expect an answer -
Why does this article ignore the fact that early this morning, AMD as much as admitted the problem was with their drivers for both Project Cars and The Witcher 3, and that they will be pushing 15.5 beta out as quickly as possible to fix the errors, and that the fix listed here will up the frame rate? This was posted by an official AMD rep on these very forums, at 2:11am -
http://forums.hexus.net/graphics-car...ml#post3471407
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...-Witcher3.aspx
and yet, at 5:21PM you try to link it to Gameworks, based on some hysteria over on Reddit?
Anyone have a reasonable explanation for this?
Suggesting a workaround for a game on a driver which was created with no knowledge of the game isn't exactly admitting a problem. A driver can't include optimisations for a game the driver devs have no access to, which is an issue many people have with GW. Suggesting a workaround and releasing a patch quickly after release is about the best you can expect in this case.
At the time the article was written I was not aware of this information, I may produce a follow up tomorrow - thanks for the tip.Quote:
Originally Posted by GuidoLS
The point of this article was to illustrate that if you take HairWorks out of the equation performance isn't being adversely affected by GameWorks, AMD and Nvidia are still comparable. Similarly, if you ran Tomb Raider AMD vs Nvidia and cranked up TressFX on the Nvidia card I'm sure we'd have witnessed a similar outcome - a larger performance drop for the Nvidia card versus the AMD card. Also with reference to Project Cars, this article was only addressing Witcher 3 but I see the point.
I hope this clarifies the intentions of the article, we aren't trying to blame AMD or Nvidia.
My issue is NOT with the workaround, or the announcement of the imminent release of the new drivers. MY issue is with this article, which ignores the facts presented not only by Slightly Mad, which has caused the latest round of hysteria, but also by an official rep from AMD. To be kind, it's sloppy reporting. And given the other article posted at roughly the same time, about Skylake, I'm going to, at least on a personal level, question the validity of every article with this particular author's by-line.Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled
Sorry - I have major issues with the fact that you posted the link to Reddit before you posted the work around information. I have no doubt your intentions were to let people know that there was a workaround. But the way things were written leaves ME with serious doubts that it was the only intention, especially since one has nothing to do with the topic.Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanM
TBH I've just reread this article and I don't see anything I'd consider hysteria.
The author mentions the performance issues with the game on AMD and pre-Maxwell Nvidia hardware, and shows the performance delta may not be all that large with a workaround. Even the title alludes to this.
Maybe I'm missing something but the article seems fairly neutral to me; they do mention the GW debate but I don't see the author blaming GW unfairly. They say it runs worse on certain hardware, which is true.
The reddit link was an introduction to how hysterical the issue had become (referring to GameWorks more broadly, which is part of both Witcher 3 and Project Cars even if the reddit thread was directly aimed at Project Cars, check the comments to see how many people are discussing Witcher 3 on the reddit thread). The workaround was posted to effectively show there is no justification for that hysteria.Quote:
Originally Posted by GuidoLS
I'm still not sure I understand the criticism here but thanks for the feedback nonetheless, I shall consider wording more carefully in future.
Considering the title, and the facts presented all the way around, there was no need to even MENTION the GW debate, let alone lead the story with a link to it. Well, I can think of a couple, but none of them are flattering.Quote:
Originally Posted by watercooled
Hair today gone tomorrow, sorry :D
Good news for AMD owners.