PCR: AMD slams tragic Gameworks

What happened to your game plan, Huddy? Reality setting in. Fog starting to lift. Or does recent past comments like "Overclockers dream" seem to have an opposite, negative effect on market share?

http://hexus.net/tech/features/graphics/794-atis-richard-huddy-talks-get-in-the-game/

 

So, pushing proprietary APIs like Mantle (which is was AMD did last year) is more healthy for PC gaming?

I also thought source code of GameWorks was available of developers wanted to license that. These comments from Huddy makes AMD sounds like bad losers.

 

Mantle was a developer initiative. I'm not so sure GameWorks is a developer initative.

 

Mantle was supposed to become open, but never really went anywhere as we all know. It did kickstart similar developments from a number of other vendors though as we all know, so from that perspective it fulfilled its destiny in a manner of speaking!

Anyway, Huddy's pretty alright as far as PR spinsters go methinks. He sounds like he actually cares about gaming - I dunno, maybe he just lies really well, but that's what it feels like to me anyway. I don't want to rag too much on him specifically despite AMDs frequent bumblings...

 

If being adopted by the Khronos group to create the follow-up to the most widely used cross-platform graphics API in the whole world (OpenGL->Vulkan) is what you mean by never really went anywhere, then yes.

Incidentally, previous to the Vulkan fork and Microsoft releasing DX12, Mantle got the support from 8 very high-profile games during its very short ~1 year of existence 2014-2015, whereas PhysX was used in 4 games in the same time period.
If Mantle never went anywhere, I wonder what one could say about PhysX.

It's not. A big chunk of it is pre-compiled DLLs.

Nah, it just makes you sound wrong.

 

No all source code is available to developers who what to pay for the license.


And Huddy, just should be a bit more tactful on what he says and how he says, many times he has put his foot in his mouth with regards to gameworks. It really shows he doesn't get enough of the information for what ever reason, the people telling it to him or he just doesn't do the research or he doesn't even know what his own Dev Rel teams are doing. I have seen this is ATi dev rel long time back being disorganized and just taking about things they should really know about.

Crysis 2 wasn't even part of Gameworks was it? Tessellation was done by Crytek, no pre compiled DLLs of games works in that game.

I have had dealings with Crytek in the past, they will never put proprietary code into their engines, just because they want to be able to license the engine to other studios without any type of penalties or hold backs.

 

Which they can't share with AMD, preventing any patch from the IHV.

 

They don't need to, if they had good dev rel relations with a developer, they can tell the Developer what is going on based on how their games are running on their hardware.

 

For a company that's running of fumes, it makes much more sense to have a figurehead blab stuff to the press than to spend money on R&D against a competitor against whom they have no chance of winning in the short or medium term.

And unlike the "over clockers dream" case, it has the benefit that it's really very hard to disprove something that isn't there.

If I were an AMD guy, it'd do just the same. The target audience eats it up anyway.

 

So you are claiming they don't do that.
Is that your accusation, that AMD doesn't tell developers how their games run on their hardware?

Can you prove that like the proof of cryptik performance delta between mid-end Maxwell and top-end Kepler GPUs, sub-pixel geometry on Geralt's hair, invisible tesselated oceans and incredibly detailed concrete slabs?

 

yeah if you want get Crysis 2 and use their editor..... or if you want more info on it buy the license for a million bucks.....

And about AMD/ATI dev rel, it blows, they don't have enough people to support many developers at all this is because they don't have enough funding for it.

PS there are many things ATI dev rel did in the past with game companies they thought were up and coming or pertain to what they are doing at the moment, which weren't that kosher, which are totally unseen by the gaming community, which I'm not allowed to enumerate, so I put nV and ATi at the same level of corporate influence on developers at the time. Just because right now AMD isn't able to do it because they don't have money doesn't mean they don't want to do these things.

yes I was part owner of company that licensed the Cry Engine and extended it to Cry Engine 2..


Just as an example some game companies were given development systems all AMD just because they asked. Intel never did that, they would give one dev system for testing that's it. There were contracts with crytek which where hinted to me that pretty much ATi purchased an entire license to develop something on it. What does a graphics card company have to do with a game engine license?

 

Haven't we been over this already? Several times?

 

Let say it come back when certain news games appears, then peoples forget it, then a new games with similar problem come and we rediscuss about it.... Let say that gamework have put a lot this type of discussion in the front of the scene lately.

 

One of the Ruby demos used CryEngine and I think was at least partially developed by Crytek. I don't know the full story.

 

Sure, if by spend money on R&D you mean spend money to put developers behind NDA walls that prevent them from discussing with Nvidia's competitors what the gamework'ss code being used in their game actually does or how it works or why performance tanks on competitor's hardware, then yes.

But that only works when you basically have market dominance and can dictate to developers what they need to do to have your support as the majority of their market uses that IHVs hardware. AMD doesn't have the option to lock developers behind an NDA paywall as not only do they have less cash, but they also have less market presence.

So, yes, unlike Nvidia, AMD doesn't have as much power to have developers put in features that quite likely will run significantly worse on the competition's hardware even though that would likely not be the case if it wasn't locked behind an NDA. BTW - by forced, I don't mean via threat or actual force. But by offering such a compelling package (plug and play features that require [supposedly] little to no effort by the developer to implement) that developers will be attracted to using it as a money/development time saving tool that upper management will insist they use it whether it is beneficial or not.

Also note, this is a relatively new thing. Nvidia in the past used to proved source code for much of their work (similar to AMD) as noted by some developers around the net. But Nvidia saw a way to gain a competitive advantage by making their competition's hardware run on less than optimal code and all the while prevent the competition from seeing said code and offering suggestions to the developers on ways to potentially make it run better on their hardware.

I current run Nvidia hardware and hate Nvidia gameworks because it holds the entire industry back in order to boost profits and marketshare for one company. Note - that as a company this is what Nvidia should be doing. Similar in many ways to how Microsoft/Apple should be bundling their own browsers in their operating systems and making opposing browsers run worse by not giving them access to key information...oops. Sorry they aren't allowed to do that but Nvidia is.

Regards,
SB

 

The real loser is the customer here, noone else.

 

Yet Huddy proudly proclaimed that over 100 game development teams had signed up for Mantle...so a couple of handfuls of games before the program was euthanized probably isn't overly impressive considering the lofty claims that were announced beforehand.

What does PhysX have to do with this thread? It wasn't even mentioned in the article let alone by anyone in the thread prior to your shoehorning it into the proceedings.