http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Under-Attack-Again-GameWorks-Witcher-3-Wild-Hunt
Finally, we have a GameWork title that doesn't run like shit, but the same GameWork = No optimization for AMD all over again.
As someone who owns a GTX 780, this is quite disheartening to hear. So now we have to buy XXX graphic card for the game to run properly? What is this? PC's GPU exclusive?
I like Nvidia products, but I hate their business practice. I have no qualms for G-Sync because it makes sense for their implementation, but I absolutely hate their GameWorks practice. Bribing devs to use your library and lock down on optimization is a move that we should be condemning on.
With that said, devs should be blamed as well. Being lazy is not an excuse to deliberately shaft one brand or another. Not to mention lazy to optimize games etc. I had an old empty thread on this topic.
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/ex-nvidia-engineer-game-is-broken-we-fix-it/75673
As ugly as it is to use a technology suite that's optimized specifically for Nvidia to leverage an Nvidia bias in the industry, it can be argued that it's just as ugly for AMD to develop an entire API that's optimized for AMD hardware.
As much as I want to hop onto the Nvidia-bashing bandwagon, I think the real ugliness is lazy developers only taking advantage of one or the other. CDP very well could have supported AMD's TressFX along side Nvidia's HairWorks and all would have been fine in the world but instead, they chose to facilitate a closed-ecosystem.
We don't have this problem in the free software world :)
That comparison doesn't really work though. For several reasons actually.
Mantle was just another option, it was never required to run a game properly and it did absolutely zero harm to the other vendor in any way.
Mantle was developed at a time when it was really needed. DirectX was stagnant and needed a kick in the ass (from mantle) to get into gear again.
Mantle wasn't proprietary and closed up to the point where the devs themselves couldn't see the code.
Parts of Mantle were actually used to help development on DirectX 12 and Vulkan API (as far as I remember, feel free to correct me on this one if I'm wrong).
AMD actually shared Mantle with Intel, which can lead us to believe that they planned to make it an open standard which everyone can support if they wanted to.
Gameworks is just a bunch of effects that can already be done vendor-neutral as well, comparing the two is ludicrous if you ask me.