"For Nvidia, decreasing the baseline CPU performance by using x87 instructions and a single thread makes GPUs look better."
Nvidia magically released PhysX compiled with multithreading enabled and without flags disabling SSE a week after this publication. But couple of days before release they made those funny statements:
"It's fair to say we've got more room to improve on the CPU. But it's not fair to say, in the words of that article, that we're intentionally hobbling the CPU," Skolones told Ars.
"nobody ever asked for it, and it wouldn't help real games anyway because the bottlenecks are elsewhere"
>Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
"Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures."
> But GameWorks' capabilities are necessarily Nvidia-optimized; such code may perform poorly on AMD GPUs.
From the arstechnica article about Witcher 3.
How dare Nvidia optimize their game enhancing effects for Nvidia hardware and forget to do it for their competitors hardware as well! And as for a lot of these complaints, could it be that a lot of companies only optimize for hardware that has the largest market share?
According to the steam hardware survey in July of 2023, Nvidia accounts for 75% of the GPUs[0]. Nvidia and Amd have a lot of incompatibilities, and it can be hard to make the same code performant on both. It makes sense, as a game company, to prioritize optimizations for the largest market. No collusion and evil corporate mega lord scheming needed for this.
Edit: Also, Nvidia does put out a lot of research efforts for free. Path rendering on the GPU for example (PhysX being another). You can find research papers and videos published by Nvidia for these things. I would consider that practical work. You can hate on Nvidia for lots of things, but this is one thing I find weird to be combative over.
Second Edit: Also, why do you find the statements Nvidia said about the PhysX improvements funny? They’re right. Most games 13 years ago left a lot of idle time on the GPU while the CPU worked overtime to do logic, physics, sound, culling, etc. Lots of that stuff has also been moved to the GPU to minimize the amount of idle time on either the CPU or GPU. Nothing funny about what they said there.
And their antics shutting out Nvidia (eg: FSR only, no DLSS) aren't being received well, not the least because their offerings are objectively inferior to Nvidia's.
While Nvidia isn’t doing these silly antics today, they’ve absolutely done them in the past. None of the large consumer silicon companies have clean hands with respect to anticompetitive/anti-consumer behaviours. They’ve all got too much power frankly.
This is factually jot the case as confirmed by Crytek developers at the time. Wireframe mode turns off clipping and cranks up LOD to max, and normally neither the water table would be visible (under the ground) nor would that block be rendered at that LOD.
practical work with PhysX 13 years ago: https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/
"For Nvidia, decreasing the baseline CPU performance by using x87 instructions and a single thread makes GPUs look better."
Nvidia magically released PhysX compiled with multithreading enabled and without flags disabling SSE a week after this publication. But couple of days before release they made those funny statements:
"It's fair to say we've got more room to improve on the CPU. But it's not fair to say, in the words of that article, that we're intentionally hobbling the CPU," Skolones told Ars.
"nobody ever asked for it, and it wouldn't help real games anyway because the bottlenecks are elsewhere"
>Nvidia's dominance today is the product of at least over a decade of work
Nvidias decade of work:
Ubisoft comments on Assassin’s Creed DX10.1 controversy https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...
AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...
AMD Dubs Nvidia’s GameWorks Tragic And Damaging, Fight Over The Developer Program Continues https://wccftech.com/fight-nvidias-gameworks-continues-amd-c...
"Number one: Nvidia Gameworks typically damages the performance on Nvidia hardware as well, which is a bit tragic really. It certainly feels like it’s about reducing the performance, even on high-end graphics cards, so that people have to buy something new.
"That’s the consequence of it, whether it’s intended or not - and I guess I can’t read anyone’s minds so I can’t tell you what their intention is. But the consequence of it is it brings PCs to their knees when it’s unnecessary. And if you look at Crysis 2 in particular, you see that they’re tessellating water that’s not visible to millions of triangles every frame, and they’re tessellating blocks of concrete – essentially large rectangular objects – and generating millions of triangles per frame which are useless."
"The world's greatest virtual concrete slab" https://web.archive.org/web/20121002034311/http://techreport... (images "somehow" vanished from original article at techreport where Nvidia runs marketing campaigns)
"Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures."