nVidia methods to inhibit great PC Gaming for all

nVidia offers the constant smell of burning bridges says AMD | KitGuru

I liked reading this article. This is an interview by a man who was the development go between, between GPU company and Game developers for both nVidia and ATi.

He is also one of the key people behind the development of Direct X.

This interview explains some key differences between AMD and nVidia when it comes to how they view PC Gamers and PC game developers. Even though I currently use an nVidia, it's been made very clear now past few years nVidia has no interest in developing game development except for their own profit and their own products. It's a do it our way or else philosophy. But this interview just horrifies me. This isn't just bad for AMD users, but just bad for us PC Gamers.
- nVidia pushing for features in games that don't enhance the game experience or even make best use of resources just to harass AMD users is horrifying to me.
- Locking MSAA to nVidia hardware ID only and for game to recognize AMD hardware and turn it off? AMD has spoofed the hardware ID and proven MSAA on some title that only works for nVidia works just as well on AMD.
- Find it horrifying that a game developer would be ok with doing this also

- It's not just PC Platform. nVidia's tampering with UE3 and other games may have a broader effect. Within the current generation consoles. there are 90 MILLION AMD Graphics.

If anyone disagrees with my sentiment, would love to hear your view on this issue. I want to know why you are OK with one of the largest tech leaders in the world attempting to take an open platform that is PC into a jungle of proprietary mess for PC Gamers? Isn't that why we game on PC? Because it is freedom. I see nVidia tactics as being fundamentally destructive of why PC Gaming is a great platform.

An older article that explains how AMD is growing their relationship with game developers
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/interviews/2010/01/06/interview-amd-on-game-development-and-dx11/

 

wow, just wow.... if its true... That is shocking indeed.

 

Also Nvidia physx was disabling itself if it detected that another ATI card was present or something like that.

 

This is interesting, but in no way surprising. I'm sure every major corporation has had at some point done some questionable, even arguably anti-competitive, practices.

 

This is one of the major reasons why I no longer buy Nvidia products.

 

Yep that is what I was going to add. You cant use a cheap Nvidia card for Physx if your using ATI it will disable itself unless you use an all Nvidia system.

 

These kinds of practices are not anything new from Nvidia. The first time ATI cards were able to surpass Nvidia cards, I guess around 7-8 years ago, Nvidia built special tricks into the driver to cheat at specific video benchmarks.

Using a card expressly for Physx is dumb to begin with, so you really aren't losing anything there, although Nvidia marketing would have you believe otherwise.

 

Yeah over the course of the last 5 or 6 years I have seen a significant amount of "low blow" from Nvidia but not so much anything from ATI.

One of my favs is how developers of Assassins Creed encoded the game for DX10.1 support and at that time only ATI had DX10.1 gpu's so since it was a "the way its meant to be played nvidia" title.

Nvidia secretly pushed them (forced them) to remove support for DX10.1 witch was showing like a 10-15% increase in FPS on that title.

 

same here.. nver buying the green teams products...

 

I'm not sure why I should believe the employee of one product's word about a competitor.

And this Batman AA thing is getting old. It's a UE3 game. ATI could've created an AA profile, and failed to do so in a timely manner.

I will continue to buy whover's product offers the best price/performance ratio.

 

I would not buy a card just for that purpose but if you had a Nvidia card now, and next year or so you upgrade your computer and go with ATI I would like to keep my old Nvidia card for the physx processing and possibly some CUDA tasks.

 

Batman AA isn't as simple as that. Did you read the explanation for that? It's built into the game to disable MSAA with AMD products, at the hardware ID level. There isn't anything AMD can do about that, that was done by nVidia.

This has nothing to do with having the best price/performance ratio, in that case it goes to AMD hands down for the past DECADE... so curious why you have a GTX 260M if that's what is important to you...

This has to do with developer relationship between Game Developers and AMD/nVidia. And the article has shown some light on the practices done by nVidia, this has nothing to do with their products themselves, but what they force and how they use their marketing money to manipulate PC Gaming.

Read the article?

 

Running physx on an nvidia card is only worthwhile if the cpu is the bottleneck, and it will decrease performance if the gpu is the bottleneck (without a dedicated physx card). But even if the cpu is the bottleneck and you have a spare nvidia card capable of doing the physx calculations, the difference is just a few percent. And there is really no point in having a dedicated card to take advantage of CUDA if you have a much more powerful card that can do Stream, except in one case: f@h.

Because that's not true at all...

 

If any of this is true Nvidia will probably see itself at the pointy end of a DoJ anti-trust investigation for anti-competitive business practices.

 

Because he doesn't want to upgrade yet?

 

My desktop build is all set except for the video card. I will be buying an Nvidia card due to superior linux support. I game on the 5870m and don't have any issues with any games, and I've played every single new game that has come out in the last 4 years. ATI is doing a good job, and so is Nvidia. Both are good companies trying to get an edge. Competition is good.

 

Yes, that's what an AMD Developer Relations employee says. And here's what the Nvidia Developer Relations had to say on the Batman issue:

So, who am I to believe? Do I just side with the GPU maker I like the most?

When I bought my machine, there was maybe one machine with the Mobility 4800 in sight, the MSI GT725.

Again, this is an AMD employee's unsubstantiated "point of view". I don't just take it at face value.

 

Is this article meant to be some kind of excuse for not creating working drivers, ON TIME, that actually work? Is Nvidia causing GSOD's? Is poor QC on chips and the number of dead ATI cards Nvidia's fault?

I'm not going to say either team has been nice. AMD too has a checkered past with some interesting benchmark tweaks. And I'm sure Nvidia does things less than fully moral, and I don't mind him calling them out on that. But... AMD needs chips that compete with Intel and AMD needs drivers that compete with Nvidia. It's basic. It's hard work. They need to get to it. They've got the graphics hardware and they've proven that Nvidia can't keep up on that front. And they've shown they can innovate faster than Intel. So now they need to bring the full package home. No more crummy quality. Get high class stuff out the door to customers in a timely fashion (no more being a year behind Intel process wise) and the customers will roll on in.

 

Did NVIDIA cripple its CPU gaming physics library to spite Intel?

 

Yeah, this AMD guy was Nvidia's Developer Relations for 4 years...

Believe the game. If you fudged the Hardware ID on AMD hardware, Batman MSAA worked just as well as nVidia with no problems. It's a fact, not an opinion or some spin by a biased AMD Developer Relations. This is nothing about belief, it's simply FACT.

The view point is your belief in there is one. There is nothing to believe. This is what nVidia did. It's cut and dry. There is no debate to be had.

 

And this is the main reason I don't buy Nvidia products anymore. No excuse for this.

 

Interesting. I assume you have a link to an article?

 

Nope, this is about Developer Relations between Game Developers and AMD. This was stated very clearly in the article. On record AMD is the ONLY tech company that releases drivers every single month and they haven't missed one. Whether the drivers were perfect for you personally, has nothing to do with it. No drivers are ever perfect, and to expect such isn't feasible by any company at this time.

The article might be a good indication why some of the issues you have with AMD exist.

It was actually found Nvidia cards fail more than AMD's. From 3xxx to 5xxx vs 8xxx to 2xx series ATI cards are more reliable than Nvidia's. It's the complete 180 degree opposite of your complaint ironically.
http://www.hartware.de/news_46585.html

I have never read where AMD did anything close to what nVidia has done. Nothing that even remotely resembles this. Getting high scores on a benchmark is nothing like crippling a basic feature that runs easily on both brand's products... Optimizing your drivers to run well on a benchmark isn't comparative to what nVidia has been doing. And the OpenCL collaboration between AMD and their partners is open platform, so it has no negative effects if used with nVidia. It's complete 180 degree opposite of what nVidia has been doing IMO.

Yes the link has been posted in the opening post since the beginning.

 

I meant an article that substantiates his claim that an ATI/AMD card would bork Batman, and that simply changing the hardware ID would fix it. Like Kevin, I don't want to take everything he says at face value.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/293944-33-enable-msaa-batman-arkham-asylum-cheating-nvidia

http://www.techpowerup.com/104868/B...s-AA-Only-on-NVIDIA-Hardware-on-PCs.html?cp=3

 

I mean no offense at all good sir, but that is a very narrow minded opinion you have there. All companies have their failings, and AMD have done some pretty despicable things in the past, providing crappy drivers being just one of them.

 

I wouldn't say releasing crappy drivers as a despicable business practice. It's certainly not anti-competitive.

 

Yeah, but AMD are just lazy. They are a big reason as to why PC gaming isn't developing as fast as it should.

 

Oh? I wasn't aware of this. Please, go on.

 

That doesn't make any sense at all. PS3, whose main graphics partner is NVIDIA has as much fault in slowing the progress of PC gaming as ATI does with WII and the xbox. Money talks and right now console games are outselling PC games by a million miles, both companies and especially game developers are being pressured to cow to console ports.

 

Exactly. And on top of this, they have stagnated the pace of hardware development. Every change they do now is to just make the same product cheaper to produce, not be able to do its job any better.

 

I've been thinking for a long time now that PC gaming is on the decline, though not because of ATI or Nvidia. I predict that if nothing on the PC gaming platform changes significantly, within 10 years PC gaming will be a niche market, probably dominated by indie developers, with consoles the gaming platform of choice for the vast majority.

 

I think this is wrong, mainstream PC gaming is dying but the strategy (not RTS) genre will never be at home on the console. And it will be a while before MMORPG can make it mainstream into consoles too. I mean, WoW is a pretty scathing indictment to the "consoles sell better" argument. That is also some incredible double talk: first post "you're narrow minded", second post "AMD is just lazy". AMD and Nvidia both existing is the only reason neither is lazy, as soon as one becomes dominate for too long we can all kiss our wallets goodbye.

 

I have had this sentiment for PC gaming for some time now. I am in grad school and most of my friends or acquaintances, if they do play video games at all, play on the consoles which is interesting and my point being that we are an "older" crowd; almost no one I have met in the least 2 years games on a PC.

I prefer 10:1 PC over a console. I just purchased an PS3 -- for exclusives such as heavy rain and uncharted, God of war, series and at this point the gameplay is pretty average but the biggest fault is the resolution: almost ALL of my games have a shimmering or such a low texture value the games seem difficult to make out, visually.

I so agree with you though that PC gaming in 10 or so years with be a myth. I have stated this more than once-- when console gaming utilizes keyboard + mouse, that is the end of pc gaming.

 

It's not narrow minded in the least. It is an opinion shaped by negative experience with Nvidia and a flawless experience with ATI/AMD (in my case).

 

Eh, I don't have such a high opinion of nVidia either, but they could be a lot worse. If anything is affecting PC gaming it would mostly be the publishers (Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft), not nvidia or AMD.

On a side note, I think it would be interesting to see another competitor to AMD and nVidia, maybe from Japan.

 

if this was all true, wouldnt amd have filed an antitrust/unfair business practices suit against nvidia yet?

 

What nVidia is doing isn't illegal. It's just being a jerk that's all. There is no law that says you can't be a jerk to anyone who doesn't buy your product. At least far as I know. But that doesn't mean Nvidia isn't willing to break law like their Chipsets vs Intel and attempting at x86 without a license etc.

I think some people clearly have gone off topic. The topic was that Nvidia tactics inhibit gaming for all. And that is clearly true. ALL includes AMD products, regardless if game uses PhysX or having MSAA disabled with AMD hardware ID or removing DX 10.1 just because they were incompetent to release a 10.1 GPU. This includes telling a game developer partner what they can and can't do (that's not Open or Freedom of PC Gaming philosophy). And also stating that Nvidia use of proprietary hardware, and methods is contrary to the reason why I thought people bought PC, because PC is freedom and open platform, regardless of what you buy or use, it just works. It's not like buying a 360 and complaining that some things don't work like it may on a PS3 or a complaining Windows doesn't work like Mac OS.

If you want proprietary, you buy Apple. If you want an Open Platform that provides freedom, you buy a PC. But with Nvidia, it seems no. But Nvidia goes further. What Apple does doesn't have any effect on me as a PC user. But what Nvidia is doing, has an effect on ALL PC GAMERS, whether they buy Nvidia or not and the impact is negative. I have yet to find a single piece of evidence that ATi has ever done anything like this. Skewed marketing and high scores in benchmarks doesn't effect Nvidia GPUs. ATi's drivers for ATi products don't effect Nvidia GPUs.

Lastly if you want to talk about how you are unhappy with ATi drivers, do it in another topic please. That's not what the discussion is about. There are infinite number of other topics/threads where you can discuss that. That opinion is first off subjective, unsubstantiated and derails this thread from the topic at hand.

 

Yep, best not to be loyal to any brand.

 

I go for the one that let's me play the games I want; at the performance that I want.

 

Amen to that.

I could care less about nvidia's business practices. If I'm confident the product I'm looking at will provide the performance I want at a price that won't make my wallet cry, I'll buy it, plain & simple.

I built my first PC primarily so I could play Crysis and the 512MB HD 3850 (by VisionTek) didn't disappoint in the least. Of course later on when I got some more money, I built another rig with a more expensive GPU (eVGA's GTX 285 SC) and a bigger screen (1920x1080), but again I was not disappointed -- furthering my original point.

However this becomes alot harder to defend when you enter the mobile realm, where what you buy is what you get - permanently. In this sense, if what nvidia does is true and they keep it up, then yes.....there would be more of a problem - with education on the technology being the most viable remedy IMO.

 

I don't really blame Nvidia for the Batman AA debacle, I more or less blame Eidos for allowing it. They are the game creators, it's their need to cater to as large an audience as possible hardware wise in a reasonable manner. I just wish developers would stick to API specs through and through like they should be. I'm sure no one wants to go back to dealing with the "API Nightmare" that was the mid to late 90s. Two graphics APIs is enough, but I'm always willing to see more competitors in the hardware market trying to outdo each other in the same task. The PhysX debacle (crappy CPU performance thanks to x87 use and not SSE) is a pretty stupid situation though. While yes, there are advantages to using GPUs for physics, so far hardly anything has really been so advanced to where it couldn't be implemented with good results on current CPUs. Makes me wonder how PhysX is implemented on the consoles. Obviously Nvidia is going to make it work as well and efficiently as possible in those implementations.

 

the point is games coded for nvidia will criple ati cards whereas games coded for ati wont do that. ive never liked nvidia. they saw that ati will prevail eventually in world market so they started to use dirty tricks.

While all corporations have their own set of tricks i did not expect that from anyone. guess you cant trust anything anymore. there always will be some hidden agenda somewhere.
eventually every1 will become politicians, lying with every each word they say

 

@physx
if this is true ,then i am forced to buy nvidia card infuture.Nvidia is doing what is called a malpractice.And i dont know how game devs agree for such biases!

 

This is happening because the country is left to be like the Wild West it once was. If this happened in Europe Nvidia would face some serious charges, like Microsoft did years ago. Bribing the game devs only to push Nvidia ahead and cripple ATI would be illegal everywhere else but not in the States.

 

And what makes Nvidia immune from this and not Microsoft?

 

What is ati doing then.???Sorry to post such nooby questions btw!

 

AMD isn't doing anything or playing into Nvidia's anti-competitive measures. That is the point. That doesn't mean AMD hasn't stepped up in providing support for Game Developers though. They provide support, ensure it runs well, but not dictate what developer can and cannot do. Activision and Infinity Ward at a recent GDC convention, their statements support this. Activision, Infinity Ward for MW2 would say, AMD we want to do this. AMD helps them do it. At no point in MW2 development did AMD say, we won't provide support unless you use proprietary technology or lock out Nvidia vendor ID.

Popular arguements from Nvidia are: Why don't you have your own PhysX? Nothing is stopping you. AMD response is, proprietary and closed systems is against what AMD believes in and what PC platform is about. That's why though it is taking a lot longer, they are working with OpenCL to ensure no matter what GPU you may have, it if supports OpenCL it will work. Same for 3D Vision. AMD does in fact support stereoscopic, and are working with 3rd party vendors so you aren't limited to just AMD hardware and the user will a choice in what they buy. This means if game developer chooses to make the game 3D, it will run on any gamer's rig, as long as they have the proper glasses/monitor etc, AMD or Nvidia, and even Intel if Intel decides to attempt gaming GPU again. And sure they have AMD Stream, but compared to CUDA, AMD emphasizes OpenCL since much of CUDA can do can be replicated on OpenCL. In fact the latest Stream 2.1 SDK has full OpenCL support also.

That's the opinion of AMD. Adopt and support new and open API, technology and make good hardware. That's what they are, a Tech company, not a software/game developer. Provide the tools and options developers, users and gamers would want give them the choice to use it.

 

I would be suprised.. their CEO is that type of person... but really , i will not buy NVIDIA if it continues with not focusing products in gaming and instead focusing on HPC... and not to mention inferior products for higher price..

I agree.. the scalling issue with 10,8 on HDMI is irritating and could have been prevented.. just waiting for 10.10 ortheriwse there will be a mutiny led by me..

 

Scaling issue? You mean to have to put 0% scaling when you connect to HDMI?