HorrorScope wrote on May 27, 2014, 23:00:
How's Mantle doing?

Fine why? There's more developers taking it on these days. Check back a few pages on /r/pcmasterrace there was an update on it.

How's Mantle doing?

Mashiki Amiketo wrote on May 27, 2014, 16:58:

ForgedReality wrote on May 27, 2014, 12:42:
PhysX does work universally, you just have to do it in the CPU with AMD, but it works. I've done it. It only works on nVidia hardware because it's their technology, and they can dictate who gets to use it. I'm sure that even if nVidia offered to license it out, AMD wouldn't pay the fees, and so we'd still be in the same place we are now.

Since then, I think they may have changed the drivers so you can't do that anymore, but that could just be to alleviate any responsibility from people breaking their systems and then trying to blame nVidia or something, but I won't speculate, unlike what some seem to want to do in this thread...

Well except it doesn't work universally. If it worked universally then I could slap a 520GT in my machine and let it do the physx calculations, but I can't. The reason? Because nvidia deliberately crippled their drivers, going as far as reversing gravity and introducing timebombs to slow users machines down to a crawl. If you had both a amd and nvidia card.

I had a problem with Nvidia and AMD "licensed" motherboards a couple years ago when I was trying to run SLI on my motherboard that had dual x16 lanes. IT was only "crossfire compatible" because of paid compatibility agreement bullshit that both nVidia and AMD partake in in order to cripple PC's with certain configurations.

I used the program HyperSLI and it worked wonderfully. Got amazing SLI performance from my crossfire-only board. This also worked to allow nVidia cards as physX and AMD for graphics without compatibility issues or performance drains.

so should we get AMD exclusive developed techs in nvidia so both side are on a lvl playing field. wont happen from eaither company. and in a way it shouldnt its like Ford making a part for a car and honda demanding since they cant use that part ford is detroying the car and truck market.

ForgedReality wrote on May 27, 2014, 12:42:
PhysX does work universally, you just have to do it in the CPU with AMD, but it works. I've done it. It only works on nVidia hardware because it's their technology, and they can dictate who gets to use it. I'm sure that even if nVidia offered to license it out, AMD wouldn't pay the fees, and so we'd still be in the same place we are now.

Since then, I think they may have changed the drivers so you can't do that anymore, but that could just be to alleviate any responsibility from people breaking their systems and then trying to blame nVidia or something, but I won't speculate, unlike what some seem to want to do in this thread...

Well except it doesn't work universally. If it worked universally then I could slap a 520GT in my machine and let it do the physx calculations, but I can't. The reason? Because nvidia deliberately crippled their drivers, going as far as reversing gravity and introducing timebombs to slow users machines down to a crawl. If you had both a amd and nvidia card.

i defently agree this story is filled with a bunch of bullshit. i have a nvidia evga 570 hd 2.5g and watchdogs runs like shit. its watchdogs code that is crap. eveyone knows this on a side not watchdogs is a port from consoles oddly console all have AMD hardware in it. and ubi soft oddly figured Nvidia platform was still better to deploy its product on. and unfortnetly like AMD nvidia does have exclusive tech its developed and wont share but so does AMD on its card the argument could be shot back and forth both ways. its sucks in the end this cry baby match between both side in the end only hurts us. and i dont see this changing given both nvidia and amd past patterns. if i am wrong please correct me with proof.

Well, let's just agree to disagree. I'm not going to fact check for hours on end on a debate that was 10 years ago. 30 minutes of research and forum crawling on 2004 era topics generally brings me to the same conclusion that I began with. Valve could have made compromises with some code changes with minimal loss in quality, but didn't.
I fact checked, and I can't support the other conclusion.
/shrug

The FX5600 was deprecated after 10/17/2006, the date of its final driver, which worked with Vista and likely with Windows 7 (without Aero; I can't speak for Windows 8 compatibility).

AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel and Nvidia are both more aggressive in the market and it shows. If you look at the 7xxx series up to the current and compare it to Nvidia, you regularly see Nvidia offering cards that offer poorer performance for the $ and yet they continue to out-sell AMD. Part of this is because of drivers (especially before they fixed Crossfire FPS) and a lot of it is from the bitcoin inflation. The latter doesn't matter for the gamer - he just wants a card that can play the latest and greatest at an acceptable rate for a reasonable price.

Does Nvidia's strategy play into that? Absolutely. Is it an unfair business practice? Arguably...probably...it certainly doesn't endear them to me, but on the other hand AMD grabbed the console market by the throat. Thin margins, but if you don't think AMD lobbied the console makers against each other - design specs were completely behind closed doors - then you are quite naive. AMD uses similarly underhanded tactics but has the goodwill of the open source community which is why Nvidia gets painted as the bad guy, despite the fact they are far more interested in the server market.

This comment was edited on May 27, 2014, 16:04.

InBlack wrote on May 27, 2014, 10:42:
Ahh, a common misconception among fanbois of all graphical colors and inclinations is that if a game features an Nvidia or AMD logo, where it says that the game is optimised for one or the other, is that the game is actually optimised for said hardware. This is not true. Its BULLSHIT in capital letters. Its simple marketing, nothing else

While this may be true to some extent regarding TWIMTBP (nVidia's The Way it's meant to be played) or AMD's Gaming Evolved programs, the situation with nVidia's Gameworks (which Watchdogs is based on, and so were Assassin's Creed 4 and Arkham Origins) is entirely different.

Gameworks is a programming interface built on top of DirectX. So the game developers, instead of calling their own internally developed libraries, or DirectX calls, can use these nVidia provided building blocks to create parts of their games.

The problem is that, part of this library is only provided as binary files, and the developers can get to look at the source code only by getting permissions from nVidia, which apparently they can't share with AMD. So while a TWIMTBP game can be perfectly optimized for AMD cards, though a bit later, a Gameworks using title can never be optimized on a level playing field ever. AMD will have to analyze the game's draw calls coming to driver and do some tweaks there at the end. The game's use of DirectX methods is hidden behind nVidia's library and so they remain inaccessible to any AMD/game-dev collaboration efforts.

I am not sure what the ex-nVidia developer is commenting about here. I doubt his comments were about Gameworks in the first place. Gameworks by its very nature restricts access to AMD and intel.

It'd be good if Gameworks was specific to nVidia hardware, instead of supporting all other GPUs but in a way where the competitor's can't tweak the performance for their respective products through the game/engine code itself.

Shineyguy wrote on May 27, 2014, 13:00:
No, it was deprecated BECAUSE it was released in 2003 while Vista released in 2006.

Computer wise, deprecation is :
When a provider no longer wishes to support a particular interface, and moves on to a new interface, and lets everyone know that the old interface will no longer be updated, and may at some point be removed entirely.
The act of letting people know, is the deprecation per se.

Simply being old does not necessitate being deprecated.

The 8P8C/RJ45 connector has been around since 1975, and you still have that plug on the back of your machine. It's not deprecated.

In contrast, AGP was new in 1996, and was deprecated in 2004.
Hence forth new AGP boards designed+made after 2004 were using already deprecated tech from the day they were designed.

-scheherazade

This comment was edited on May 27, 2014, 14:59.

Shineyguy wrote on May 27, 2014, 13:00:
No, it was deprecated BECAUSE it was released in 2003 while Vista released in 2006.

Again, no. First 3 years is nothing, but most important it was deprecated cause it didnt have full DX9 compliance. Radeon 9xxx got supported still in Windows 7.

yonder wrote on May 27, 2014, 10:56:
...

While AMD/ATI is far from blameless, most of the corporate shenanigans in the GPU wars have been done by nVidia.

...

nVidia makes great stuff. But their corporation is terrible.

nVidia follows the Creative model of suing their competitors with frivolous shit and then buying and burying their technology after they've crippled the company through their litigation. I don't care what ATi did with Valve 10 years ago or with Tomb Raider, killing your competition with bullshit courtroom antics is beyond the pale.

For reference, nVidia did to 3dfx what Creative did to Aureal

Wookiestick wrote on May 27, 2014, 13:42:
"...Valve coded Half-Life 2's DirectX 9.0 path to use 24-bit floating-point shaders all of the time, when it is really not needed all of the time. "
"...possible to force 16-bit floating-point shaders and see no massive difference in image quality."
Not denying that the FX card was inferior to the R300 chipset, but Valve didn't have to force DX 8.0 on the FX.
Source.
Edit: fixed url.

They simply did not want to degrade graphics quality using 16bit precision. Are you going to ask the same if other game refused to run on SM 2.0 if it was designed for SM3.0? Doesnt make sense.

What everyone needs to understand is that FX cards run slow on full precision. It's not like Valve intended to run slower on FX cards. The problem was the chip. Also HL2 was heavy on shaders at the time. FX cards were really slow on heavy shader demanding games, cause not all shaders are wanted to run on FP16. FX cards were crap and top of the line FX5800 was one of the worst card in history.

Just get the facts straight.

And to make it clear, I hate fanboyism. I currently have a AMD6850 and my 780TI is on the way.

"...Valve coded Half-Life 2's DirectX 9.0 path to use 24-bit floating-point shaders all of the time, when it is really not needed all of the time. "
"...possible to force 16-bit floating-point shaders and see no massive difference in image quality."
Not denying that the FX card was inferior to the R300 chipset, but Valve didn't have to force DX 8.0 on the FX.
Source.
Edit: fixed url.

No, it was deprecated BECAUSE it was released in 2003 while Vista released in 2006.

Because of the way benchmarking is done on specific games, and pc gamers purchase cards based on a price and performance (which they get from the benchmarks), there is a lot riding on your cards looking good in these game benchmarks. And game specific optimizations can make your card look very good indeed in a game that is used as a performance benchmark.

The closer you can get your optimizations into the game code up the better your hardware is going to look. That's why it's best to get the devs to put your optimizations into the game before it ships, not after with driver specific optimizations. Hence why we have these battles and accusations.

Shineyguy wrote on May 27, 2014, 12:43:

ochentay4 wrote on May 27, 2014, 12:29:
EDIT: Also, thanks for NVIDIA FX cards are crippled and they were never supported in VISTA and after. This is because the card was never full DX9 compliant. I still have a FX5600 and I hated NVIDIA so much when Vista came out!

FX5600 was already deprecated when Vista came out. Surprised you had even tried to use that with Vista...

Yeah it was deprecated BECAUSE it wasnt fully DX9. Thats what I just said minutes ago.

ochentay4 wrote on May 27, 2014, 12:29:
EDIT: Also, thanks for NVIDIA FX cards are crippled and they were never supported in VISTA and after. This is because the card was never full DX9 compliant. I still have a FX5600 and I hated NVIDIA so much when Vista came out!

FX5600 was already deprecated when Vista came out. Surprised you had even tried to use that with Vista...

ochentay4 wrote on May 27, 2014, 10:31:
The closest thing to *REAL* crippling was done by nVidia in regards to forbidding PhysX from working universally. Turned out to not be that big of a deal, but yeah... that was definitely, to quote the nVidia employee "bullshit" (that's some mature classiness there nVidia employee...).

PhysX does work universally, you just have to do it in the CPU with AMD, but it works. I've done it. It only works on nVidia hardware because it's their technology, and they can dictate who gets to use it. I'm sure that even if nVidia offered to license it out, AMD wouldn't pay the fees, and so we'd still be in the same place we are now.

Years ago, I ran an old nVidia card in conjunction with my AMD 4870x2. I used the nVidia card for handling JUST the PhysX, and the x2 for the graphics. It worked great, and it wasn't too hard to set up.

Since then, I think they may have changed the drivers so you can't do that anymore, but that could just be to alleviate any responsibility from people breaking their systems and then trying to blame nVidia or something, but I won't speculate, unlike what some seem to want to do in this thread...

Wookiestick wrote on May 27, 2014, 10:46:
Seems to echo 10 years ago when Half Life 2 came out. As memory serves, Valve had some sort of sponsorship with ATI (prior to AMD buyout) and the Geforce 5/FX series cards were deliberately crippled because of poor shader model performance. Some tech savvy individuals found out that like 2 lines of code would alleviate that problem.

Another wrong comment, the problem was simple: NVIDIA did only have 16bit partial precision shaders (fast) and 32bit full precision shaders (really slow, the weak point of FX series).

Valve programmed all shaders to use 24bit full precision (which they consider the correct and standard way) and FX cards were forced to use 32bit (slow as hell). ATI did not have this problem as at 24bit they were still fast. So after this FX fiasco (blame Nvidia for not optimizing 32bit path, it reminds me of 3dfx stubborness using 16bit) Valve made a special codepath for FX to use on some places 16bit shader registers.

All in all, NVIDIAs fault.

Get the facts straight.

http://techreport.com/review/5636/valve-steamed-over-nv3x-performance/2

EDIT: Also, thanks for NVIDIA FX cards are crippled and they were never supported in VISTA and after. This is because the card was never full DX9 compliant. I still have a FX5600 and I hated NVIDIA so much when Vista came out!