AMD and NVIDIA Trade Allegations, Denials Over Shady Tactics 69
crookedvulture writes "In an article published by Forbes earlier this week, AMD lashed out at NVIDIA's GameWorks program, which includes Watch Dogs and other popular titles, such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Assassin's Creed IV, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Technical communications lead for PC graphics Robert Hallock alleged that GameWorks deliberately cripples performance on AMD hardware. He also claimed that developers are prevented from working with AMD on game optimizations. The Forbes piece was fairly incriminating, but it didn't include any commentary from the other side of the fence. NVIDIA has now responded to the allegations, and as one might expect, it denies them outright. Director of engineering for developer technology Cem Cebenoyan says NVIDIA has never barred developers from working with AMD. In fact, he claims that AMD's own developer relations efforts have prevented NVIDIA from getting its hands on early builds of some games. AMD has said in the past that it makes no effort to prevent developers from working with NVIDIA. So, we have another round of he said, she said, with gamers caught in the middle and performance in newer titles hanging in the balance."
nVidia Being nVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of careful wording and dodging by nVidia.
Their focused on working with devs to get GameWorks shit integrated into the source code. nVidia can and does see dev source code, if the dev requests such hands-on help. Seeing source code is extremely beneficial for optimization, as is integrating GameWorks directly into the code. nVidia wouldn't be doing that if it wasn't.
Yet nVidia expects us to believe that AMD is not disadvantaged by now being unable to see source code. It's your typical nVidia anti-competitive bullshit. nVidia's new agreements forbid AMD from seeing code that has GameWorks shit integrated. So AMD gets screwed over because nVidia has the larger market share and the optimization stage is typically the last part of development. Devs are under the wire and don't have time to fork/merge/redact code all over the place in order to expose a GameWorks-sanitized path for AMD's review.
nVidia really pisses me off with this bullshit. They have great performance and features, but it's ultimately to the detriment of the industry as a whole because they lock shit up so hard that it becomes a novelty that it underutilized in a fractured market (see PhysX).
Re:nVidia Being nVidia (Score:4, Insightful)
actually no. AMD will release mantle as a open standard by the end of the year, but currently it isn't finished yet.
Actually yes, they are already working with developers and shipping games so at this stage it is in commercial production but is very much is closed and proprietary not to mention your claim of "by the end of the year" doesn't appear to be substantiated, in fact AMD have been even more vague with: It could be as early as sometime next year or maybe the year after. [vr-zone.com]
releasing standards before they are finished is obviously a bad idea.
What sort of idiocy is that? Publicly releasing the spec for feedback is a good idea, but instead it is being kept closed despite it being in shipping games and drivers.