Assassin's Creed: Syndicate - NVIDIA GameWorks Video

His HW is not strong enough, but those features mentioned work on AMD HW too.
So his comment may not be against gameworks. And mine is actually saying: "While gameworks effects look good there, it is waste of computation power since rest of rendered geometry looks like 10 years ago."

Yes, it is actually 10 years since F.E.A.R. came with probably 1st soft shadow implementation. And good enough lighting.
10 years since Quake 4 came with magnitude better texture detail including lightning, shadows, parallax mapping, ...


This game does not look as good as they want everyone to believe. And I am damn sure that it would be total disaster on 10 years old high end system.

 

Oh well I'm looking forward to it, and I think it looks stunning as well, as did Unity. I'm not a huge AC fan, but despite that I did like Unity and its setting and this looks even better.

 

It looks like they disabled all ambient oclusion to show the goodness of their hbao XD.

 

Well i for one loved AC:Black flag and have watched some parts of a playthrough and it seems good in my oppinion. All this complaining though, if you dont like what you see, play something else or wait for some performance reviews

 

I still have to finish Black Flag, but playing too much other stuff atm.

Hope i can run PCSS but probably not at 60fps, with it on in Unity i got around 40-50fps with it on.

 

Yes thats the problem here too, too many games to choose from. I have about 30 installed but im yet to finish around 10 of those

 

NVIDIA should release a new Ambient Occlusion technique called LMAO. I'm sick of hearing TXAA being superior. I always stick with MSAA or SMAA. TXAA slightly blurs the textures. In AC4, Ultra Shadows looked better than PCSS. NVIDIA Godrays in FC4 turns off Volumetric Fog. So, you have to choose between Volumetric Fog or Crappy Godrays. I also see that every game with GameWorks is a crappy port. Even AMD's GameWorks equivalent is better than this. HBAO+ is the only feature that is acceptable by me. Simulated Fur in FC4 was way buggy.

 

Yes.

 

And where is the tessellation that was introduced with Unity and never saw a day light?
Now they don't even show off with it, probably because adding it to the broken game will make it screenshot fest so lets make it just barely playable without it.

 

Not many games thats AMD specific and excluding BF3 they all ran on AMD and nVidia hardware pretty well anyway with far fewer issues. Gameworks is a different kettle of fish it runs crap on anything but the current highest end flag ships.

Of course people will, they paid good money for a game thats nothing more than a lag fest even when far exceeding the recommended specs. Recommended specs is just that but when they slap game works in there and nVidia series 7 and less along with AMD owners having crippled performance, heck they have even don't lable them as nVidia specific features anymore then yes they have the right to be pissed off, cause they took the money from nVidia to promote their newest hardware and gave their customers a big FU slap. They have done nothing but screw their customer over for a quick cash inject from nVidia. Remember nVidia won't let AMD see the source code or how it runs making it difficult for AMD to optimise their paths for it, heck even developers can't properly optimise it either cause it's part of their licence agreement. So yes it will be a moan fest, i have had a couple of games with nVidia ****doesn'tworks and i can say i will NEVER buy any other game with that on it NEVER! Every game with gameworks has been a complete disaster bugged to hell and unoptimised to hell for both nVidia and AMD owners, normally it takes a few pathes before they can even be considered remotely playable.

 

The whole codepath thing is a red herring.

The bottom line is that nearly every gamework effect utilizes tessellation as it's primary function. And AMD's best card (Fury X) has the tessellation performance of a GTX 780. Even if AMD had full access to the source and Nvidia's engineers and everything -- their performance would still suffer.

You can make the argument that maybe Nvidia shouldn't be implementing these effects with tessellation. But honestly after reading a lot about how they implement God Rays and Hairworks, their reasoning makes sense. Hairworks has a performance impact, yeah -- but so did TressFX. Yet Hairworks is enabled across a range of characters and creatures, TressFX was enabled on only one. Also due to the nature of the vertex implementation, TressFX makes the initial setup for the character extremely difficult. Artists need to spend far more time per character than they need to do with Hairworks, which just requires modifying a bunch of parameters.

God Rays is the same thing. Go download CryEngine 2/3 or read about the volumetric light shafts in the engine. In CE2 it required a ton of scene setup time and could only really be used in specific lighting circumstances. In CE3 it uses the dynamic GI but the performance hit is extremely high. Nvidia's God Rays renders a grid in the sky, dynamically tessellates the grid based on the shadow map, and extrudes the vertices. It's extremely easy to implement in games/scenes and the performance scales dynamically based on the complexity of the geometry.

Anyway, instead of whining, AMD should just improve it's geometry performance. Similarly Nvidia should improve it's shader performance. Battlefront for example, an AMD sponsored title, runs way better on AMD hardware than it does Nvidia's -- because the game is heavily shader based, which is where Nvidia's architecture is a little slower.

 

+ 1 to this ^...

AMD fanboys keep on bashing gameworks. why not bash AMD? well for the past decade all you got was Pantene Simulator.

 

Thankfully AMD users can set a maximum tessellation level which helps.

 

Way better? Not so sure I'd call it way better.

 

TXAA looks by far the best when the scene is in motion. MSAA and SMAA is better for static shots.

 

Maybe not on the Ti level, but at my resolution (QHD) a R9 290 ($230) performs the same as my 980 ($450).

 

Never understood the moaning about a feature like gameworks that can be turned off. Amd cards can use it, but nvidia is better at tessellation than amd and you got a slider in the amd driver that can manipulate tessellation for better performance.

 

Because you own a pair of Nvidia cards?

Try a couple of AMD GPUs and disable Gameworks, maybe you will discover Gameworks is a little more than a couple of on/off features.

The problem with Gameworks and AMD GPUs is not to enable or disable some features.The problem is game devs accept by contract that the added Nvidia features code is closed for them (and anybody else) and this piece of software is taxing the AMD performance in many cases EVEN with Gameworks features turned off because it's integrated on the game code affecting more than only Gameworks on/off features.

I.E. The Witcher 3 case:

Revisiting GameWorks: AMD, Nvidia tangle over optimizations to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

 

Ah, that's what you meant. Yeah, I understand what you're talking about now. I already find it highly questionable that the 980 hardly appears in benchmarks anymore, especially those related to anything testing the compute schedulers (AoS), but I didn't bother to read up on it. Yeah, the Asus 980s haven't been the best purchase I've done so far

 

If true that sucks, at least a pretty large majority of gamers do not have to worry such issues.