So, on Twitter i saw twit from Wendell: https://twitter.com/tekwendell/status/533264902505656320
And i think that you should really look at this: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6048819&cid=48382141
If you are lazy to read all that, here is paragraph talking about CDProjetRed "sellout": "Disgustingly, Epic have taken a large Nvidia pay-off to make Gameworks the EXCLUSIVE 'enhancement' library of Unreal 4 (the current most successful licensed engine), and the team behind Witcher 3 (the most anticipated open-world fantasy game ever) have agreed to ruin the performance of that game on AMD GPUs (when it is released early next year) in order to gain Nvidia funding. "
So what do you think about this ? It might be true or not ?
CDProjektred have ALWAYS optimized The Witcher games for Nvidia. the reason why it may be a problem now is that Witcher 3 will be using Nvidia Gameworks, Which if you have read a few Articles and Seen the Ubisoft Non-Sense Lately. Gameworks is HORRIBLE for AMD cards. almost to the point where some people were saying that the 290x was getting beat by a GTX 770 which SHOULD NOT be the case. the only people that probably need to worry about The Witcher is AMD Users. which sucks to be honest.
Doubt it is true. CDProjekRED is risking a lot of customers if they were to do that. Modding community would be at risk too. Can't say much about the GameWorks though. Hope CDPR manage to pull off something crazy that Nvidia will shit their pants.
My guess is it will be fine on amd. Maybe not for the first couple weeks but these things usually get sorted out with driver updates and junk so that the difference isn't that big compared to vendor neutral games.
I think it is more frightening that any developer would let nVidia insert Gameworks into their title. From what I heard the code is all proprietary nVidia crap and engineers from nVidia put it into the game. The developers aren't even allowed to see the code. Thats really weird...
I wouldn't blame CDProjekRed. Almost all AMD promoted games get converted over to Nvidia evenutally. Just look at BF3/BF4, used to be AMD optimized and it killed nivida games back in the 5870/7970 era. Nvidia really had to lower AA and do custom setting just to compete.
Dirt 3 used to run better on AMD too, now it heavily favors Nvidia. Last one I remember was Bioshock Inifinite, nowadays you run the benchmarks and it favors Nvidia. Batman Arkham, APB AC, Company of Heroes, Day-z etc.. Nvidia constant improve and update their drivers, meanwhile AMD is falling off after game releases. Nowadays the only chance they got is a head start with AMD Mantle optimized games, giving them a few months to a year of wiggle room before Nvidia catches up.
I made a similar thread about this a while back after they came out and said that they were going to treat all platforms equally, however, in the PC environment, that often mirrors consoles (Red vs Green), is it still equal if one group doesn't get to experience the special effects, to which I would consider "content", fair?
These exclusive deals are as asinine as they are motivated by profit, whether it's DLC, or, in this case a middleware that's GPU brand exclusive.
I was kinda hyped for W3 since is open world rpg (like Gothic). I am going to wait for test how it will run on equal performing (not priced) Nvidia/ATI gpu. If performance will be the same on both gpu, then good for CDProjectRed. If not ... well, they are off my dev list.
Off topic: W2 was such a disappointment for me, felt like corridor shooter, also there were bugs that i couldn't continue the story. So was hopping for W3 to redeem for itself.
I wouldn't necessarily call it selling out, but I definitely think that gameworks is going too far. Please correct me if I'm wrong here (haven't had the time to look into this properly) but afaik gameworks is proprietary nvidia code that not even the develoeprs of the game can actually access. I've heard some arguments that this gives indie devs and smaller studios an easy way to get really nice effects going in their games, but what we've seen so far are AAA games that definitely don't need the "help" using it and that it (apparently) severely gimps the performance on AMD cards.
Both AMD and Nvidia have their special little effects and technologies that are optimized for their cards and therefore work better on them, but you can usually turn those off (PhysX, TressFX, etc.). If Nvidia (or AMD for that matter) are in control of large parts of the game/engine with proprietary code then they simply can't be trusted to not fuck over their competition. And what's even worse is the fact that they don't have to give a flying fuck if it affects the game in a negative way, they don't sell the copies, they just need the public to think that their competition is falling behind to sell even more of their GPUs.
Looking at it this way it's hard to ignore the fact that both FarCry4 and AC:U have quite a few technical issues and that they may be related to gameworks after all.
And the worst part is that you have tons of people who will stick to Nvidia because of this, they just don't want to run into a title that does not run well on their system so they stick with the company that fucks the competition over and probably even hurts their own customers by doing that. You even hear folks like Totalbiscuit praising "special lighting effects if you happen to have an Nvidia card" while simultaneously complaining about performance and wondering why TXAA tanks the framerate like hell. Oh well, the only way that this kind of stuff could help ALL consumers is if we shoot for open and free standards. This is kinda similar to the whole third party "exclusive" game-releases on console, you're not gaining anything by having this game "exclusively" on your platform you're simply denying other people the possibility to play it properly (not a perfect analogy, but I think it kinda works)
Witcher games were always optimized for Nvidia. This never stop ppl of decently playing on both systems. And to base an opinion on any remark from any of the 2 companies (which would be biased) would not be a good idea in general. Only benchmarking when the game is released will reveal the truth. There is a lot of discussion about the matter but usually at the worst case the game will be a bit delayed in being optimized for AMD as with every other title that is Nvidia supported (and visa versa). It not a bigger deal than every other game. And there a demand for CD projekt to both support directX12 and Mantle post release.
Also do not forget this also a Xone and PS4 game which both use AMD hardware. CD projekt will have to do work on optimizations on AMD hardware anyway.