Ian McNaughton blasts NVIDIA over PC Game Issues

[Apoptosis]

Ian McNaughton blasts NVIDIA and The Way it's Meant to be Played program they got going on...

This is taken from his blog post here

AMD prides itself on supporting open standards and our goal is to advance PC gaming regardless whether people purchase our products.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares our philosophy. Nvidia has recently sampled some newly released The Way it is Meant to be Played titles, including Batman: Arkham Asylum, to press in hopes that they would use these titles to benchmark against the HD Radeon 5870 and 5850. There are some known issues with these proprietary TWIMTBP titles.

Batman: Arkham Asylum
In this game, Nvidia has an in-game option for AA, whereas, gamers using ATI Graphics Cards are required to force AA on in the Catalyst Control Center.

The advantage of in-game AA is that the engine can run AA selectively on scenes whereas Forced AA in CCC is required to use brute force to apply AA on every scene and object, requiring much more work.

Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced. This option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure rom.

To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory …

Need for Speed: Shift
In another TWIMTBP title, we submitted a list of issues that we discovered during the games’ development. These issues include inefficiencies in how the game engine worked with our hardware in addition to real bugs, etc.. We have sent this list to the developer for review. .

Unfortunately you will be unable to get a fair playing experience with our hardware until the developer releases a patch to address and fix our reported issues.

Resident Evil 5
AMD was unable to receive builds of this game early enough to get a chance to test and address any open issues. We will work with the developer to test and adjust any compatibility or performance issues that we encounter.

[Apoptosis]

NVIDIA Responds:

NVIDIA statement on Batman AA

A representative of AMD recently claimed that NVIDIA interfered with anti-aliasing (AA) support for Batman: Arkham Asylum on AMD cards. They also claimed that NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant to be Played Program prevents AMD from working with developers for those games.

Both of these claims are NOT true. Batman is based on Unreal Engine 3, which does not natively support anti-aliasing. We worked closely with Eidos to add AA and QA the feature on GeForce. Nothing prevented AMD from doing the same thing.

Games in The Way It’s Meant to be Played are not exclusive to NVIDIA. AMD can also contact developers and work with them.

We are proud of the work we do in The Way It’s Meant to be Played. We work hard to deliver kickass, game-changing features in PC games like PhysX, AA, and 3D Vision for games like Batman. If AMD wants to deliver innovation for PC games then we encourage them to roll up their sleeves and do the same.

NVIDIA Developer Relations

[InspectahACE]

Nice response.

[gibbersome]

Nice response.

Don't know quite what to make of this. ATI has released one helluva card in the HD5870 and they need to let it do the talking.

[Skippman]

This goes back to Nates earlier article about gaming changing what you're seeing depending on cards. He did a review a while back using S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as an example and found that diffrent cards rendered the same scene diffrently.

Now did nVidia work with Eidos? I don't know. I imagine they probably did given nVidia's superior software support and driver support. I haven't played Unreal 3 so I don't know how much that is true. nVidia does have a long standing tradition of working closely with developers. I've only ever seen one game engine that was hyped by ATi as being developed with their help, Half-Life's "Source" Engine.

[lordvic]

I think it's one of Nvidia's "Dick" moves. It's not like it has not happened before.