When it comes to PC games, there’s a not-so-subtle war being waged between AMD and Nvidia for the continued loyalty of their users. The battlegrounds involve things like driver optimization and the implementation of proprietary features, software, and tools to give each graphics card manufacturer a competitive advantage.
Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs is the latest PC title to take advantage of Nvidia’s GameWorks, a robust collection of tools that allow game developers to produce a visual experience which epitomizes Nvidia’s rallying cry: “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played.” Developers license these proprietary Nvidia technologies like TXAA and ShadowWorks to deliver a wide range of realistic graphical enhancements to things like smoke, lighting, and textures. Nvidia engineers typically work closely with the developers on the best execution of their final code.
Recent examples of Nvidia GameWorks titles include Batman: Arkham Origins, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and this week’s highly anticipated Watch Dogs.
As you’re suspecting from the headline, Nvidia’s GameWorks is only good news for Nvidia, their development partners, and their GPU users. That’s logical, and it serves a sizable slice of the market. According to AMD’s Robert Hallock, it’s terrible news for the PC gaming ecosystem on the whole.
