God-rays and Nvidia dirty tricks

[zanity]

By now I hope every PC gamer understands the toxic effect Nvidia has on the gaming industry- it literally ruined the most recent Batman game (PC version) for instance- ruining the once excellent reputation of the British developer, Rocksteady.

 

Put simply, Nvidia spends TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars every year paying developers to use game engine code techniques that benefit the latest Nvidia GPUs, at the cost of synthetically awful performance on AMD and older Nvidia GPUs.

 

Nvidia's favourite trick is 'tesselation' because Nvidia has trafitionally had a significant lead over AMD in this hardware assisted function. In truth, REAL tesselation methods are almost never used in game engines, because the explosion of VRAM and triangle rates allows far better results via LOD and actual complex meshes.

 

But the tessaltion Nvidia pushes is NOT for visual superiority, but to collapse the performance of most of the GPUs still in use. For example, on of the first examples of Nvidia sabotage was when Nvidia paid the now defunct Crytek to introduce teselation into Crysis. And what did that mean? Well simple objects like crates were useless rendered with TENS OF THOUSANDS of triangles, so the ultra game settings would have MUCH better benchmark scores on Nvidia over AMD (don't believe me- go google the Youtube videos proving the cheat).

 

More recently we had the 'hairworks' scandal in Witcher 3, where Nvidia paid CDPR to set the antialiase flag to ON while rendering hair because that made Maxwell Nvidia cards run vastly faster than Kepler Nvidia cards (and ironically had no impact on AMD cos AMD drivers ignored the AA setting anyway). Kepler owners had to hack the game to get acceptable framerates with hairworks on (at the loss of no visual quaiity). AMD games had to hack the game to lower the tesselation setting, for the loss of very little image quality. At Nvidia's BEHEST, CDPR did NOT include game options to adjust these settings (though after months of online outrage, a patch did finally address some of the issues).

 

Now a mod has appeared on Nexus allowing gamers to enjoy ULTRA godrays on LOW godray performance hit. It turns out Nvidia paid Beth to use godray settings that massively OVER-TESSELATED the dataset to almost zero visual change. Of course, the consequence of massively over-tesselating was to once more SYNTHETICALLY make Nvidia's current GPUs appear far better than the competition.

 

When I started playing vanilla FO4 on my 6870, the graphics were terrible, and the 'performance' in built up areas laughable (5 second pauses were frequent). The usual forum creeps would dribble that this is because the 6870 is 'ancient' and 'below spec'.

 

Well today, having DISABLED the useless texture streaming function (inhereted from iD's megatexture library), boosted the APPARENT amount of VRAM available to more than 1GB using ENB, fixed many of the purposely wasteful over-sampled vanilla textures with smaller, better ones from 'vivid textures', the SAME game runs at a more than playable framerate with everything (but godrays) 'high'. And now I can fix god-rays as well.

 

Yet I'm LUCKY- the vast majority of people who tried to play on 6870 class hardware (1GB VRAM cards with STRONG ROP and Shader performance for lower screen resolutions) would not have had the technical know-how to fix their gaming experience. Look at how many mods are on Nexus encouraging such gamers to find ways to play the game at ULTRA-LOW settings, making it look like something from the PS2 era!

 

I cannot express in accurate wording just how disgusted I am at the purposeful cynical manipulation of PC gaming by Bethesda without risking getting banned for 'language'.

 

And to the TROLLS who will predictably reply that any serious PC gamer should own a high end Nvida GPU (despite my earlier technical explanation as to why this is plain WRONG)- let me say this. I would LOVE their to be gaming engines today that are so wonderfully clever and advanced, only the latest hardware could run them. I started gaming in the era of TEXT-ADVENTURES on mainframe computers, and imagined a future age of computing that could visually display such worlds. I knew of the Voodoo chip from 3DFX a year BEFORE the graphics card went on sale, and KNEW with utter certainty that it would change the face of PC gaming forever.

 

I hate with a passion the corruption of Nvidia that seeks to find ways that suck up 50%+ of the processing power of a modern GPU without making ANY difference to the rendered image. I loathe the fact that Nvidia easily finds willing publisher who will take massive bribes from Nvidia to cripple their engines purely to help sell the most recent massively over-priced Nvidia product.

 

Did you know that one of the 'innovations' in the new Polaris 480 card from AMD is a hardware function that detects when Nvidia 'Gameworks' is rendering DOZENS of useless trianges per PIXEL, and culls those triangles so AMD hardware doesn't perform so badly in benchmarks designed by Nvidia? A total waste of die space and power consumption purely to overcome the type of CHEATING the over-tesselation of god-rays in vanilla FO4 represents.

 

We know why Nvidia cheats like this- it has gained a massive market share over AMD using these tricks. And business is war. But what is Beth's excuse. FO4 made an absolute fortune in sales. Beth didn't need Nvidia's bribes- but took them anyway, to the detriment of tens of thousands of their customers at least.

[Surilindur]

This is great. Thank you. Thumbs up. It is a shame things are as they are, but at least it is refreshing to see also others who excercise critical thinking. :thumbsup:

 

Edit: It was suggested somewhere indeed that limiting tessellation to either 8x or 16x in the CCC or Radeon Settings (I am not sure if CCC had it, at least the new Radeon Settings does) could help in some cases.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Contrathetix

[CiderMuffin]

Uh, the thing that ruined the PC ports of the Batman games was it being outsourced to a third studio because WB is filled with idiots. The rest of the stuff sounds like conspiracy theories though especially since you failed to actually cite any source.

 

http://kotaku.com/sources-warner-bros-knew-that-arkham-knight-pc-was-a-1714915219

 

Rocksteady made the Arkham games but Iron Galaxy Studios did the PC port.

Edited June 22, 2016 by CiderMuffin

[RoyBatterian]

Both companies have been caught cheating in games and benchmarks for over a decade.

 

It's business as usual.

[Kamuchi]

Edit: I was wrong, it was between my ears and looked during dawn :sad:

Edited June 24, 2016 by Kamuchi

[noahdvs]

I wouldn't demonize them, but they are dicks sometimes. It's Nvidia's prerogative not to share any technology they've developed, but paying game companies to help them force out competitors or sabotage the performance of older generation graphics cards for little to no graphical gain is really shady. I won't be surprised if those kinds of practices get banned someday on account of trying to create a monopoly. AMD has at least been pushing forward gaming for everyone by being more open to other companies. I probably still won't buy an AMD graphics card next time I have to buy a new card though. Last time I checked, their Linux drivers weren't as good as Nvidia's, which is kind of ironic. I have no loyalty to any GPU manufacturer, BTW.

[Deleted3507349User]

Just came acros this mod 5 minutes ago, just the fact of hating batch files, I just added the 3 lines directly to the fallout4prefs.ini.

Quicly zipping through Sanctuary Hills with all the settlers and junk, frame rate remains pretty much constant while panning around :D

 

The god rays shimmer more, but to be honest, makes it looks a bit more realistic http://imgur.com/zO5LtVW

What three lines, specifically?

[Deleted4363562User]

I think we gamers have ruined everything by continuing to buy any and all garbage released. We have become little more than digital junkies.

[Aquery]

I think we gamers have ruined everything by continuing to buy any and all garbage released. We have become little more than digital junkies.

I thought they called those enthusiast... phhaha

[CiderMuffin]

I think we gamers have ruined everything by continuing to buy any and all garbage released. We have become little more than digital junkies.

God damn it, I can't believe I ruined gaming.