Why 'Watch Dogs' Is Bad News For AMD Users -- And Potentially The Entire PC Gaming Ecosystem

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.

Full article- 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/

Posts in discussion

Posted: 10 years 4 months ago by Leki #1198

^^ that is a really great interview from last week on PC gaming gfx tech and goes over some of the points I mentioned above on why AMD are the good guys promoting open standards to push PC gaming forward and nvidia are scumbag cunts with dirty underhand tactics that also punish nvidia card owners.

support the good guys, support AMD gfx

Posted: 10 years 5 months ago by Leki #1047

AMD WHQL drivers used to be released every month and also beta drivers between that. Never had problems with AMD drivers and updated drivers for big games usually get released at the same time.

There is not much Nvidia can really kick up a fuss about for mantle, AMD is driving things forward, AMD are open to nVidia using it for there cards. But now because of mantle we see Microsoft taking notice and now adding similar options into DX12 so that they don't get left behind.

nVidia advancements are all proprietary limited to only nVidia users which segment the market. Open source is the way forward to benefit everyone which is why AMD for example backs OpenCL and nvidia goes with proprietary CUDA.

You are right that we need them both to keep up competition otherwise nVidia would still be selling titans for £1000.

I've had both Nvidia and AMD cards in the past but I now mainly try to stick to AMD due to Nvidias underhand business practices and being a bunch of cunts. Free feel to look into the nvidia bumpgate scandal, assassins creed DX10.1 removal, Batman Anti-Aliasing scandal, Nivida bribing Origin PC to drop AMD and bad mouth them etc etc

Nvidia are happy to lie, cheat and bribe anyone, even there own customers and partners.

The way you're meant to be played

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