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"Solution: AMD optimizes HairWorks."

How do you optimize code you have no access to?

"It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do they not have developer support; they actually play the victim because others take the initiative."

Like how a Project Cars developer or spokesman claimed that AMD did not help for months only to be completely disputed later on? Also, ask Kepler owners about their current driver support in recent titles. They are not happy.

"NVIDIA set out to optimize the game as best as they could for their hardware."

AMD helped optimise several titles that worked just as well on NVidia (excep that one Tomb Raider fiasco, what was solvable doe to the openly available TressFX code. Can we say the same about hairworks?). But somehow many NVidia titles are optimised in a fancy way that always hits hard on AMD cards (Crisis 2 and Batman AA come in as uncovered examples).

"AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by not getting involved."

I guess you can back up that statement.

Edit: wording, grammar

Good luck optimizing for shader code you have no access to, because that is (was?) the situation, at least for some previous games that used it. Not even the developers of the games have any access to it. Gameworks actually prevents AMDs to optimize paths in their drivers. Exclusivity does not matter a bit.

Note that AMD also has a program that help developers write shaders and optimize their engines to work better on AMD cards. But that does not prevent NVIDIA to see the code and optimize their own drivers accordingly.

So, to me the problem here seems NVIDIA's attitude to sabotage (for no technical reason, except economics, see the physX on x86 debacle when they refused to compile code for something else that i386) performance on other platforms for their own gain. Like physX, Gameworks is already showing itself for what it is and will eventually fail and be forgotten. And people will believe that AMD is at fault for the next NVIDIA "magic technology" that brought no gain whatsoever to the gaming world.

> It's just an extension of the systemic AMD problem: they [very likely] have the best hardware but their Windows drivers are horrific and not only do they not have developer support

You are strongly misrepresenting the actual situation. AMD is painfully aware that their drivers lack compared to Nvidia but they disagree with the reason. AMD does not want to put nearly as many hacks into the drivers as Nvidia does. They went quite far (by making Mantle) to make the drivers leaner and more predictable.

Nvidia traditionally detects misbehaving game code and patches it up with various degrees in the driver.

> AMD didn't set out to do anything: once again they sabotaged themselves by not getting involved.

AMD made the right step and backed the only thing that will evolve the situation from the status quo: Mantle and now Vulkan/DX12. Otherwise they would always end up playing this game of magical drivers that NVidia supports but nobody likes.

> ...as many hacks into the drivers as Nvidia does.

That sounds like an absolute nightmare to maintain.

It sucks actually because when I've written custom game engines, one doesn't know if one is using OpenGL properly because NVIDIA just makes things work even if you did a bad call. Then when you try to run it on other drivers that are more compliant, it all fails all over the place.

The solution I guess is to try and find a highly compliant, picky driver, and develop using that, because it is easier to get it right at the beginning than to go back and try to fix things.

See also: HTML.

I think there are debug wrapper for GL; too much overhead to run in production, but should tell you if you're Doing It Wrong (tm). Have you tried something like Regal?

> Mantle and now Vulkan/DX12

The issue here isn't that at all. The issue is a turn-key hair rendering solution. ~~Which AMD does not provide.~~ Correction: AMD provides TressFX, which had bad NVIDIA performance before NVIDIA stepped in and fixed it. ~~In fact I can't find any graphics code samples on their website, contrasted with the abundance on the NVIDIA website.~~ Correction: AMD does have samples.

> The issue here isn't that at all. The issue is a turn-key hair rendering solution.

That is incorrect. The issue here is hair rendering which AMD has a turn-key solution for it: TressFX.

Right, I stand corrected. However, do keep in mind that NVIDIA had similar performance issues during the Tomb Raider launch - and instead of complaining about it NVIDIA stepped in and, as I've been saying, helped the game developer improve TessFx compatibility with their cards.

Note that the source of TressFX is fully available in the DX samples. This cannot be said about whatever Nvidia does which cannot be disclosed to IHVs.

> Note that the source of TressFX is fully available in the DX samples

What does that have to do with my core point of AMD sitting back and complaining?

> This cannot be said about whatever Nvidia does which cannot be disclosed to IHVs.

NVIDIA provides restricted source to everything but TXAA, PhysX and beta libraries.[1] I'll re-iterate my point: AMD would have access to the code if they walked in the door.

[1]: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/NVIDIA-and-AMD-Fight-...

> What does that have to do with my core point of AMD sitting back and complaining?

AMD: here is the code, optimize it.

NVidia: there is the binary blob (you can't look at the code), feel free to make your card exhibit the same performance characteristics as our geforce reference cards without infringing on our patents. No, you can't change the code. You could hot patch game executables though.

AMD is not allowed to look at the source.

I think the issue is that the licensing of GameWorks, which HairWorks is part of, prevents the game developer from sharing it's source code with anyone other than other licensees. That means AMD has to reverse engineer it if they want to optimize their drivers for it. That isn't the case for TressFX, which is freely available to anyone and allowed Nvidia to quickly add support for it after Tomb Raider released.

Right, that makes sense. It may not be an issue depending on which conflicting piece of information you go with.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582304

Do keep in mind that NVIDIA received the code for the game so they could optimize their driver for it [1].

There is no chance of the same happening with AMD and TW3, since at least at the beginning of 2014:

    According to Nvidia, developers can, under certain licensing circumstances, 
    gain access to (and optimize) the GameWorks code, but cannot share
    that code with AMD for optimization purposes.

See [2] for the source of that statement.

The situation is really that different.

[1] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-07-nvidia-apologis...

[2] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks-...

It seems as though that might have changed[1] (dated 1 year after yours). In truth those in the AAA industry might only be privy to what is actually going on, as I'm seeing a lot of PR bullshit/he-says-she-says from both sides.

If NVIDIA is actively restricting access to the code for HairWorks that is indeed very scummy, however, they would technically still be within their rights.

[1]: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/NVIDIA-and-AMD-Fight-...

Yes, the FUD seems to be everywhere, I concur. And we'll never know the truth unless a GameWorks contract gets leaked in full, aka never. Business as usual. :)

Intel was still within their right (technically) when it forced their own compiler to compile non-optimized code for AMD CPUs. That does not make it right for us, the customers, this is the point I wanted to make.

> That does not make it right for us, the customers, this is the point I wanted to make.

That's an discussion that's likely to never come to a sensible conclusion :). The AMD/NVIDIA situation is definitely one of the negative outcomes of an open/competitive marketplace.

From what I read, AMD doesn't have access to the GameWorks source code. These features are also designed with the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs in mind, you can't really optimize around fundamental differences in the GPUs (e.g. the newest Nvidia cards are significantly better at tesselation).

I don't see why AMD would need to source code to be able to optimise their drivers. Sure, it would be nice, but with a good GPU profiler (they should have one), one will be able to pinpoint bottlenecks and optimise for them.

Your point about hardware differences makes more sense; I don't expect AMD to admit that their hardware is simply not as suited for the task as Nvidia's is.

I find your argument lacking the real world facts.

Open Source drivers for NVIDIA suck due to lack of documentation. If AMD has a difficult time than Open Source drivers are doomed.

AMD does make good hardware and it has traditionally been a good company. The issue is the lack of a standard. I don't like non-standard solutions with closed code or hardware.

You're talking about reverse engineering. This is unfair competition, plain and simple. Depending on how you view their market (general purpose devices versus gaming), Nvidia has a majority marketshare, with over 75% of the market for gamers. That qualifies it for a monopoly status and given this story, we could easily be talking about them violating the antitrust laws.

Of course, I may be exaggerating and government interventions are rarely any good for consumers. It would be better if we, as consumers or developers, would acknowledge such abuse and punish such companies with our thoughts and wallets.

So no, AMD not having access to that source-code is not OK, plus AMD shouldn't have to patch their drivers for that game, because such a practice has far reaching consequences, affecting indie game developers (Nvidia won't patch their drivers for indie games that aren't as popular as Witcher 3), or any operating system that isn't number 1 (which on the desktop means anything non-Windows).

This hails back to the early Guild Wars 2 days, which might predate HairWorks: developers take 'responsibility' for the GameWorks code once NVIDIA leaves. They can't open source it, but they do have the source and by extension so would AMD if they ever walked through the door. Disclaimer: complete hearsay.

What you say about HairWorks optimization is true, but you can't hold the fact that AMD has failed invest against NVIDIA. Look at it this way, if TW3 hadn't added HairWorks everyone would have the static hair meshes. As a game developer I would integrate HairWorks so that I could shine on compatible platforms (albeit I'd probably disable it by default for AMD, instead of having a bad first experience).

It's a pity that the consumer gets caught up in all this. Who's to blame is a lot more difficult to determine than most people think. Purely in terms of graphics cards, NVIDIA has great post-sales support. If I buy an NVIDIA I know games will run well on it because NVIDIA makes sure that they do. This is a pro-consumer post-sales service that I get at absolutely no cost. They are also running up against AMD users in the way that people describe in the comments of that article.

It's not a black and white situation but AMD is certainly not helping in even an insignificant way. AMD customers should be demanding answers from AMD before (not in exclusion to) they demand answers from NVIDIA.

Well no, tressfx fills the same gap, but with far better cross platform performance.

>but you can't hold the fact that AMD has failed invest against NVIDIA. Look at it this way, if TW3 hadn't added HairWorks everyone would have the static hair meshes. As a game developer I would integrate HairWorks so that I could shine on compatible platforms (albeit I'd probably disable it by default for AMD, instead of having a bad first experience).

TressFX does the same thing, but AMD worked with Nvidia to optimise it for their GPU as well, so everyone's happy. This would have been objectively better for the user, if you disregard the money the devs received from Nvidia for implementing HairWorks instead of TressFX.

> Solution: AMD optimizes HairWorks.

Why didn't NVIDIA make HairWorks, NVIDIA's software, run properly on AMD cards? Given that NVIDIA has the full source, that should have been possible.

I really don't understand the AMD driver complaints. I've been running AMD cards off and on for years (Last 2 cards were AMD, previous one was Nvidia) and I have zero problems with AMD drivers.

And Nvidia? There are a large number of reports that the latest drivers cause crashes and there have been problems in the past too.

I don't think the difference between AMD and nvidia is nearly as wide as nvidia fans want you to believe.