I find it hard to swallow their statement when they're exclusively partnered with Nvidia to bring out the better visuals, because, technically, PhysX is an exclusive content. Don't you agree?
Would their statement not be more accurate if AMD's own GPU features get the treatment too (TressFX 2.0, TrueAudio, and Mantle)? Better yet, create their own simulation system that doesn't rely exclusively on either Stream Processors Cuda Cores like CryEngine or Frostbite? Wouldn't that be more "equal"?
Yeah, but its not like PC users are having to wait a month or two after the Xbox gets its dlc.
And PhysX extras never really make a huge difference.
That .gif is night and day difference. Not even squinting my eyes can gap the huge difference.
most games tend to lean either towards the red team or the green team, but the games still work on either system. the problem isn't that the game coders won't have every technology both teams offer, its that red and green won't share their tech with each other. It's competition. Game designers decide which tech they think would improve their game more and implement it, then flash whichever team they decided on in the game opening.
Like, with Thief having true audio, which makes it much more immersive, since you can listen to all the things happening around you. Or Assassin's creed black flag with physx, enhancing shadows and particles, so that when you fire heavy shot into the ship next to you, thousands of splinters and smoke explode out of the ship, and it looks very nice. I remember linus talking about how ridiculous it is that you can't have all these things at the same time, even with an AMD card and a Nvidia card in the same system, you can't run them together. Its dumb.
Most games that use PhysX render it on the CPU not the GPU. so whatever card you have it doesn't matter.
I'm assuming when they stated that they were referring to treating all platforms equally. Not specifically an AMD or nVidia thing
Not true, It's very much reliant on GPU cores. That's why when Running an AMD card and running the PhysX on CPU your FPS suffers major. There are some task the CPU handles better than the GPU, and there are some task handled better by the GPU. The latter is true for PhysX.
I'm a cynical person. So when I read "Game designers decide which tech they think would improve their game more and implement it, then flash whichever team they decided on in the game opening" I can't help but cringe a little. Let's face it, Nvidia has more money than AMD can and ever will for the foreseeable future. So, it's more believable to me that Nvidia and CD Projekt are in an exclusive deal, and "part of the deal is to not give AMD a special treatment".
I'm not pulling hairs out of this though, I know this is the reality, having been shafted by multiplatform games last gen from the PS3 side by Microsoft.
1. CD Projekt Red is a small Polish company, they don't have the resources of a big box like Ubisoft, yet Ubisoft is king in discriminating users.
2. The whole nVidia v AMD thing is blown up beyond proportion, and that's exactly what nVidia wants to achieve, now that their cards are not sold as much as they would like. Even the same software will perform differently from PC to PC, even if those PC's have the same hardware. There is just variance in everything. "The way it's meant to be played" is just a marketing stunt, that nVidia can't really realize. It's like their Tegra Zone, it's just a software blockade to inhibit other hardware platforms. Windows is inhibiting the hardware anyway, and both nVidia and AMD are inhibiting performance in their proprietary drivers to make people buy new GPU's all the time. An open source AMD driver that's just over 1 MB in size can get almost to the same performance level as the proprietary Catalyst driver which is over a 100 MB large. What does that tell you? That Catalyst is optimized? Yeah sure, to prevent the maximum performance to come out so that people buy new cards all the time. The proprietary nVidia drivers are even larger than Catalyst, and the nVidia cards are technically far simpler, so what does that tell you? The same pretty much. It's all just marketing bullshit. If it runs well, it runs well, synthetic benchmarks aren't even worth a fly on a cow's butt. It's a different thing if you're into OpenCL compute performance, there you really have a benefit from using AMD cards, but for games or video, who cares?
No, you couldn't be more wrong. Yes the haardware physx on most games runs crappy on cpus, save for metro 2033 and maybe LL if you have an overclocked i5 or 6+ thread cpu, but most games that use physx use the cpu version for their physx engine. Pretty much all unreal engine 3 games that do not have the option for hardware physx and console games using UE3 use the cpu physx just fine.