Watch Dogs just latest example of attempt to "widen the margin in favour of NVIDIA products", says AMD.
By Tim Colwill on May 28, 2014 at 9:28 am
The on-off war between AMD and NVIDIA has flared up again overnight, with an AMD representative claiming to Forbes that NVIDIA's Gameworks solution — of which Watch Dogs is the latest star — represents a "clear and present threat" to PC gamers.
Gameworks is a suite of proprietary NVIDIA technologies, including TXAA and ShadowWorks. Ubisoft have been heavily involved with NVIDIA lately, in a technical partnership that means most of their recent games look hot as hell on PC — but perhaps not so much on AMD systems.
"Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40% of the market) to widen the margin in favor of NVIDIA products," said AMD's Robert Hallock. "Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code—the most desirable form of optimization."
"The code obfuscation makes it difficult to perform our own after-the-fact driver optimizations, as the characteristics of the game are hidden behind many layers of circuitous and non-obvious routines," explained Hallock. "This change coincides with NVIDIA's decision to remove all public Direct3D code samples from their site in favor of a 'contact us for licensing' page. AMD does not engage in, support, or condone such activities."
The whole article, which I recommend you read, goes into detail about AMD's allegations and explains other ways in which they claim their open technology differs from NVIDIA's proprietary code. However, as the top of the article notes, NVIDIA have disputed all the claims — so stay tuned to see their response.
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