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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, how did they pick which games to optimize?

Does the studio pay them to do it? Because Nvidia wouldn't care otherwise?

Does Nvidia do it unasked, for competitive reasons? To maximize how much faster their GPU's perform than competitors' on the same games? And therefore decide purely by game popularity?

Or is it some kinda of alliance thing between Nvidia and studios, in exchange for something like the studios optimizing for Nvidia in the first place, to further benefit Nvidia's competitive lead?

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I can't give details on how we do our selections (not nvidia but another gpu manufacturer). But we do have direct contacts into a lot of studios and we do try and help them fix their game if possible before ever putting something in the driver to fix it. Studios don't pay us, it's mutually benefital for us to improve the performance of the games. It also help the game run better on our cards by avoiding some of the really slow stuff.

In general if our logo is in the game, we helped them by actually writing code for them, if it's not then we might have only given them directions on how to fix issues in their game or put something in the driver to tweak how things execute. From an outside perspective (but still inside on the gpu space) nvidia does give advice to keep their competitive advantage. In my experience so far ignoring barriers that are needed as per the spec, defaulting to massive numbers when the gpu isn't known ("batman and tessellation" should be enough to find that), and then doing out right weird stuff that doesn't look like something any sane person would do in writing shaders (I have a thought in my head for that one, but it's not considered public knowledge. )

AFAIK NVIDIA and AMD do this unasked for popular game releases because it gives them a competitive advantage if 'popular game X' runs better on NVIDIA than AMD (and vice versa). If you're an AAA studio you typically also have a 'technical liason' at the GPU vendors though.

It's basically an arms race. This is also the reason why graphics drivers for Windows are so frigging big (also AFAIK).

Double "AFAIK" makes me trust you more :)

I think this is very accurate. The exception is probably those block buster games. Those probably get direct consultancy from NVIDIA during the development to make them NVIDIA-ready from day 1.

Even smaller games often get some amount of consultation from Nvidia/AMD - they are typically in the credits in some form.

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