Interesting Forbes article

Rojiin

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/05/26/why-watch-dogs-is-bad-news-for-amd-users-and-potentially-the-entire-pc-gaming-ecosystem/

It talks about  Nvidia's Gameworks platform and how it hides gamecode information from AMD when its used.  So AMD looks substandard at game launch because they can't review and optimize code till the game is released.

This may be old news to some, but I just found it so I thought I would share.

tawess

bring back memories of the of Navigator/Explorer feud...

 

But afaik Apple and MS have done this since... Well.. forever.

weslubow

Nvidia seems to have missed the rise of social media. Time to leave Nvidia products on the shelf until they learn to play well with others.

Ridelynn

I had just stumbled across this article before heading here and was about it link it myself.

A GPU manufacturer not playing fair is hardly news - that has been the case since the beginning of time. It tends to autocorrect in some fashion, although that correction is sometimes a bit rocky. It is a bit alarming that a 290X is getting beat by a 770, but this is one game, and it has happened more than once in the history of PC gaming where a less expensive card beats out a more expensive one.

The big news in the article I found, however:

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According to AMD’s Robert Hallock .... AMD’s Mantle, a low-level API, doesn’t require the company’s GCN architecture to function properly. AMD says it will work equally well on Nvidia cards. The company clearly waves a banner of open-source development and ideals.

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That's the first time I've heard of this. Everything I had read prior to this was "GCN-only," and I understood the entire point of Mantle was to be a fast and accessible lowish-level API wrapper for GCN hardware functions.

Ridelynn

Also, two recent additions to this news:

HardOCP testing shows GPUs more closely to where you would think them to be, not a huge disparity like the Forbes article shows.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/05/27/watch_dogs_amd_nvidia_gpu_performance_preview

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In terms of performance we were surprised how close the R9 290X and GTX 780 Ti are. There has been a lot of FUD around the internet about AMD potentially lacking in performance compared to NVIDIA. We hope we have smashed the rumors and provided facts based on gameplay and not some quick-use benchmark tool that will many times tell you little. We actually found the Radeon R9 290X slightly faster in some scenarios compared to the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. We also found out that gameplay consistency was a lot better on Radeon R9 290X with "Ultra" textures enabled thanks to its 4GB of VRAM.

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And there is a former nVidia employee going off about his displeasure of the Forbes article. Linking here for entertainment value, not because I think it adds any technical merit to the discussion.

https://twitter.com/basisspace/status/471133525115011073

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John McDonald:

It is extremely frustrating to see an article criticizing work you did at a former employer and not being able to comment that the person who you are quoting from was just completely full of unsubstantiated bullsh*t. Thanks, Forbes. And while I never did, and certainly do not now, speak for nvidia, let me say that in the six years I was in devtech I *never*, not a single time, asked a developer to deny title access to AMD or to remove things that were beneficial to AMD.

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Cleffy

NVidia sponsored games have been making AMD/ATI based cards work worse for well over a decade. Pretty old news. One of the many reasons to hate NVidia.

allenkhulld

Originally posted by weslubow
Nvidia seems to have missed the rise of social media. Time to leave Nvidia products on the shelf until they learn to play well with others.

I agree with you on this!