IHV-specific Enhancements in Games

No clue. But what I read are reports of the release game working fine on earlier drivers or using different game profiles, while these latest drivers were touted as adding performance for the game just a couple days before release. I can easily see a case where adding optimizations for a title with the expectation of it doing one thing may cause issues if it actually ends up doing something different - it does seem that there is a "path" (apparently the "Hitman" profile) in these drivers that are compatible but presumably not offering the performance.

 

Funny how you only hear this now that it's nVidia having issues

 

Maybe this will finally put a stop to the whole, Nvidia are better at video card drivers meme? Naw, probably not.

And to Triniboy, Rage is the example that comes more readily to mind although there have been others.

Regards,
SB

 

Whether it is NVIDIA or AMD having "issues" is irrelevant. A seemingly last minute reduction in performance, image quality, and stability for a potentially large percentage of the customer base is not a trivial issue. This reflects poorly on both the game developer (Crystal Dynamics) and the IHV (NVIDIA), and it would reflect poorly on any game developer and any IHV.

 

If you take a look at the NVIDIA Geforce drivers forum, Tomb Raider doesn't appear to be "working fine" on earlier drivers. There are countless reports of instability with different drivers and with different Geforce cards (Kepler and Fermi included). So some unanswered questions still remain: Why did Crystal Dynamics change their final code, and why did this code change affect performance, image quality, and stability for Geforce cards? Why did Crystal Dynamics only provide the final code to NVIDIA (and AMD?) just days before the game was released?

 

There are plenty of potential reasons why the game is whacked on Nvidia cards and not all of them are down to shenanigans.

AMD and Square could have decided to go with TressFX quite late in the day. Perhaps there was money involved as AMD pushed to have their new effect included...that could have broken a few things on Nvidia cards without it necessarily being deliberate.

Maybe Nvidia were too busy on their own pet project? They fucked up Guild Wars 2 because they were so busy with Borderlands 2 and TXAA at the same time. Note that they also blamed Arenanet then as well.

Or you know, maybe AMD just paid Square to break the game on Nvidia cards. That would be one of the most suicidal moves in game developer history however, and I seriously doubt Square is that stupid no matter how much AMD offered (hypothetically).

 

Didn't Nvidia themselves say the game was basically fine up until the last build? If it wasn't fine then why should it be fine with the last build?

I'm pretty sure the most likely reason for Nvidia's woes here is their lack of interest in the title as AMD and Square clearly have a much better relationship. I don't really see the difference here compared to what Nvidia and Gearbox or Ubisoft normally do, except Nvidia has been even lazier with drivers for this title than AMD is on Nvidia titles.

 

Your first mistake is taking Nvidia's word at face value. For all we know they could be playing the blame game because they got caught with their pants down for not working more closely with the developer.

Second, where were you and your self righteous indignation when TWIMTBP developed games did the same thing to AMD? Most people around here blamed AMD for not paying attention (and cash) to developers to tailor games for their hardware. Well, now you are seeing the fruits of AMD firing back. Hope you like being on the other side of the coin, Bioshock: Infinite is coming in a few weeks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Yuyc8W-U0

 

That would be very funny (and sad) if true. I can see optimizations for one build wreaking havoc on another. However, if it was then surely nVidia would have advised people to use the older builds?

With respect to Rage it seems it was a mess on AMD hardware at launch. There wasn't any griping about last minute builds or mysterious performance drops though.

Maybe nVidia is making a lot of noise about nothing. The "fixed" drivers might end up only 5% faster for all we know. How intrusive are IHV driver optimizations nowadays? Is it just tweaking configurable settings or full on shader/code replacement?

 

What NVIDIA said is pretty clear. They said that the final build--which was provided to them just days before the game was released--resulted in lower performance/IQ/stability on Geforce cards than the previous build that was provided to them.

 

I'm sorry, but this is just inane rambling. To suggest that it is good practice for a game developer to release a game that is potentially unstable for a large percentage of their customer base is insane. Only ill-wishers would want that. Obviously this is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last, but that doesn't make it good practice, irrespective of whether or not AMD or NVIDIA or someone else is involved.

 

See Dave's point - it's possible that Nvidia's last-minute optimisations for the previous build were broken.

 

But those optimizations would only appear in the latest driver versions, whereas previous driver versions are also borked from reports.

 

In that case the likely reason is down to AMD-centric optimisations in the final build, likely TressFX related.

 

Or maybe not.

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgameshardware.de%2FAMD-Radeon-Hardware-255597%2FTests%2FTomb-Raider-PC-Grafikkarten-Benchmarks-1058878%2F

The game has crashed twice for me on my 6850 in 3-4 hours play (looped sound, needs a hard reset) btw, and my system is rock stable in everything else.

 

I think the answer is obvious. The code wasn't final earlier than then.

A lack of public griping doesn't make something not true.

 

Yes, I've made the same point before. With the prevalence of digital distribution (or even just internet connections) long gone are the days of a "gold release" code freezes weeks before the game release; day one (and post launch patches) are more the norm than the exception these day as the devs can use that additional time to make changes and still hit their target release date.

 

Any chance that the hair's collision detection would have a more narrow narrow phase or a less broad broad phase? At times, this large distance between Lara and her hair can be really unimmersive, otherwise I like the effect very much though.

 

The bounding box on Laras body is too big, yes. Luckily the devs are already working to fix that (as told in the PCPer live event thing)

 

Digital distribution doesn't explain why the released game is unstable for a potentially large percentage of the user base, and digital distribution doesn't explain why the major IHV's should be given only days to debug the final code before the game is released in the wild. The game developer is largely at fault here for rushing (?) to release a game that has issues with instability for so many users.