I will not buy a Witcher 3 because...

[Aditya]

Ok not counting all your points without any source, you come here specially to announce you aren't going to buy it based on baseless points?

Well actually I too will not buy 'a' Witcher 3, because I will buy minimum 3 copies from different places moment it's up for pre-orders, just like the previous games.

 

[Aver]

Which other solutions in particular?
I'm quite sure that PhysX is the only way to have this awesome fur without some huge investment of the programmers' time to implement it from the ground up. Otherwise CDPR would certainly go for these alleged "other solutions".
So it seems that your opinion basically equals "if I can't have it, let nobody have it". And, by the way, you _can_ have it, if you upgrade to an Nvidia card in time for TW3 release, which is still quite far away.

Now they invest their time in features that will accessible for ~30% of their consumers, maybe less. There are other great technologies that can be enjoyed by all their customers, all PC and console owners.

 

[Zabanzo]

LOL. It sounds as 'fuck you' from CDPR. No, thanks. If CDPR wants to sell game for all users and to have a more buyers without requirements for replace vendor's graphics card CDPR must to sell game without one-vendor's lockiin technology.

No one is saying "fuck you" to you... You are blowing it way out of proportion. No one is forcing you to switch to Nvidia, you will be able to play the Witcher 3 with AMD just fine, few already tried to tell you that, but it seems you dont want to listen...

 

[przemuch]

I replayed Tomb Raider recently, this time using Teh Awesome Hair option. Guess what, when Lara went from

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod I killed a man, no, he's still moving, ohmygodohmygod NOW I killed him... right?"
to
"Lara smash! I am going to go Franko The Crazy Revenge on your ass! Yes, I mean all 2431265 of you!"
within 10 minutes, it felt
just
as
stupid.

This is not Crysis franchise. Unlike there, visuals for Witcher 3 are going to be a cover, not what's inside a book. It's like CGI in GoT: you have to offer something worthy of immersion, otherwise you are not going to need immersion-enhancements anyway. PhysX is as important as Whitewalker Facial Scarring technology. Imagine if those were only visible on 3D TV - I can already see a mob of angry GoT fans refusing to watch it, ever!, and making threads about it on GoT forums.

 

[username_3581677]

I have the Ultimate solution..... Build a Intel/Nvidia rig and An AMD/ATI rig and play all games they were they are meant to be played.... ;-)

 

[Ancient76]

Is physics really such an important element for the Withcer 3!

Lets get serious!

I want good, smart, optimization!

 

[ironclaw]

It's always funny to find the same childish thoughts and reactions on every video game forums. It's always been the war between graphics manufacturers, and a lot of games work better on AMD or Nvidia, just a few of them not to say none of them run equally on both. If they had chose AMD, Nvidia users which are a bit more numerous would have complained about it. So they made a move to ensure best graphics for their game, how is that a wrong choice ? Just go buy nvidia, or stop complaining.

You miss the point:

Nvidia advanced physx will run exclusively run on nvidia gpus, this isn't the difference of amd graphics card systems running the game at 40fps and nvidia systems running it at 60fps. this is the difference of amd graphics card systems running the game at 10fps and nvidia systems running at 60fps. I.e. Unplayable on non nvidia graphics card systems.

Again, telling us to just buy nvidia is such a rude statement it makes me mad, that's what nvidia wants, they want me to buy their graphics cards just so I can use advanced physx, it's not going to happen, I won't get sucked in by their little marketing trick.

I do however, still want accelerated fur. Again, there are non gpu specific solutions out there, such as havok.

 

[secondchildren]

Ok guys firstly, calm down and let's not insult anyone, neither members nor devs. Courtesy first and above all. Two posts have been hidden for rudeness.

Secondly, for FUD devulgers: It's recommendable that you either post a source of where you saw those information, or it's better to be careful with accusation.

 

[Shelledfade]

I have AMD radeon 5970 so I hope I am not getting shafted lol....

To use physx its pretty much required to have an nvidia card otherwise it will run purely off of the CPU if you're using an AMD card, and it doesn't really work that great. I can't even run borderlands 2 with max physx unless I want 10 FPS with an i7-2600k @ 3.8ghz, and I can play the witcher 2 on maximum settings with a decent framerate. That's how much the difference is.

So while it isn't specifically required to use an nvidia card to use physx, in so many words it basically is required in the end, regardless. You don't specifically need a nvidia card, but yeah... you aren't going to go very far without it if you want physx.

I'm still going to buy the game regardless, I just hope there isn't that much of a visual difference without physx because I certainly won't be able to use it.

 

[jerf.674]

There's havok which does gpu acclerated now, and there's also tressfx for hair and fur.(correct me if I'm wrong on the tressfx).

As for your statement about telling me to buy an nvidia card. It's these sort of blatant practices from nvidia which makes me NOT buy their hardware. If I purchased an Nvidia card that's the same as me buying an Xbox One because an exclusive game is on it I want. I'm not going to allow microsoft to put their 24 hour check on me just because there's a game I want.

Apparently either Havok doesn't have the capabilities to produce e.g. this kind of fur simulation, or implementing it would require too much work compared to the PhysX case. Also don't forget that Nvidia sends their engeneers to help along, which makes things much easier for CDPR. I'm quite sure that, being a not very large studio, this was the only option CDPR could implement with respect to the feautures in question, time- and cost-wise.
Nvidia doesn't put a 24 hour check upon you, so better compare it to Sony. Would you buy PS4 for an excusive that is available there?

Now they invest their time in features that will accessible for ~30% of their consumers, maybe less. There are other great technologies that can be enjoyed by all their customers, all PC and console owners.

In any case, console hardware is too slow to actually run these features we discuss here (also Nvidia announced that some sort of lighter version of PhysX will be available on consoles). So only PC consumer distribution matters. And according to the latest Steam survey, Nvidia users formed 62% of all people using discrete graphics.

 

[ironclaw]

That steam survey doesn't discriminate the quality of the hardware though. I've got one amd system that runs steam and 3 nvidia systems, all three nvidia systems are really low end. System referring only to graphics solution.
My amd system is a 7970... so pretty high end.

To answer your question Jerf, no, no I would not. But you have a good point, sorta thinking about nvidia as being a console exclusive, I did not consider that. I still wouldn't buy a ps4 just for one or two games though.

At the very least I don't want my wolves to be that ugly, perhaps cdproject red can get some fur looking fur into the non physx solution, perhaps they could get a bodged tressfx solution working or something. Even if it doesn't look as good, as long as it looks decent compared to adv physx completely off.

 

[Aver]

In any case, console hardware is too slow to actually run these features we discuss here (also Nvidia announced that some sort of lighter version of PhysX will be available on consoles).

With GPU computing? No, they are not too slow. And this PhysX that will be available on consoles is the same thing that is on X360 and PS3 and the same thing we have on PCs when you turn off GPU computed features. It is so called "physics wannabe". Try to play some physX game and set physX on the lowest setting...

Yes, physX look great on nVidia cards, but it doesn't fully work on other platform and its basics functions looks really bad. At least in games that were released so far. Basic PhysX looks like physics from decade old games and even nVidia seems to admit - just look at their promo videos of games that use physX. Those videos basically look like this:
"Here is game with PhysX set to high:" *awesome effects* "and now look at effect with PhysX set to low:" *complete garbage*. "If you don't want to see this sh*t, better buy our card!".

They could use Havok and everyone would have good physics. Instead they have chosen PhysX, so nVidia users will have great physics, but rest of their customers will PROBABLY have really bad physics.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

By the way. There are open physics APIs, based on open tech as well (OpenCL). So why aren't developers using them?

Examples:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/GTC/documents/1077_GTC09.pdf
http://bulletphysics.org

 

[ironclaw]

The main reason why Gilrond is because Nvidia has awesome support. As much as I dislike advanced physx being nvidia only, Nvidia is the king of api support. They give away basic physx for free and help with setting up everything.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

May be. But at least it's more fair to users of other GPUs to use portable solutions based on OpenCL. Unless this support is so critical, that without it these APIs aren't usable.

 

[Jack Bauer 24]

What does this mean for console users?

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Ideally, I'd say CDPR could use both if they really wanted to. I.e. Physx on Nvidia cards, and let's say Bullet on other ones (since they can argue that PhysX is more optimized on Nvidia hardware).

What does this mean for console users?

From what I read, Bullet is available on PlayStation 3, so it might be present on PS 4 as well. If CDPR cares to use these optimizations, they might consider using it instead of PhysX there. If they do, this can apply to desktop AMD cases as well.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_%28software%29

Be sure to direct this question to CDPR if you are an AMD or potential PS4 user.

 

[Aver]

The main reason why Gilrond is because Nvidia has awesome support. As much as I dislike advanced physx being nvidia only, Nvidia is the king of api support. They give away basic physx for free and help with setting up everything.

Not only nVidia has awesome support. Look what devs say about Havok in interviews:

Remedy:

Since we started using Havok Physics, their support has been very well organized and professional and they have helped the Remedy team a lot during the physics engine integration. We have achieved a high degree of customization in a short time-frame while implementing widespread collision detection and character controllers for the game. We are very happy with the performance, too, and the integration of new features is generally easy. We are confident that Havok will save us lots of time and money further down the road. So far we are only scratching its very surface.

Bungie:

Havok's flexibility and ease of use have made it one of our cornerstone development tools and almost a recognizable 'character' within the Halo 3 engine.

Turbine

Havok’s easy code integration and implementation, and its high level of customer support will provide Turbine with the tools we need to maintain the continued success of our current and future titles.

2K

We chose Havok due to the ease of integration into our existing BioShock 2 code across multiple platforms. The Havok team also provided terrific support as we implemented their technology to enable immersive and realistic game play.

Ubisoft

Havok is a professional organization from its engineering and support to sales and contracts. We’ve always appreciated Havok's willingness to listen and work with us on serious and sophisticated commercial and technical issues. Havok goes the extra mile to understand the complexities of our business and the challenges development teams face.

Massive Entertaiment:

Havok is one of the key pieces of technology which allowed us to make everything in World in Conflict dynamic and destructible. The engine's excellence in robustness and performance is paired with world class support.

And guy from Relic said once that Havok's engineers work with them so much that they consider them as part of team, but I can't find this quote now .

Also Havok won award for best 3rd party software on Game Developers Conference 5 times in the row. And there have to be a reason why Havok is being used in ~80% of the games.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Aver: It looks like each major chip maker is aiming to focus on another physics engine. Nvidia - Physx, Intel - Havok, and AMD - Bullet. Only the last is open source though.

This is referenced in some older announcements. No idea where it stands today:

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-announces-new-levels-of-realism-2009sept30.aspx
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2007/20070914corp.htm

 

[Aver]

Aver: It looks like each major chip maker is aiming to focus on another physics engine. Nvidia - Physx, Intel - Havoc, and AMD - Bullet. Only the last is open source though.

AMD doesn't focus on bullet. Bullet ex-developer works for AMD now and he makes stuff like TressFX etc., but they don't support bullet or any other physics engine.

About Havok. Yes, it is owned by Intel, but they treat their software and hardware business completely separately. Havok was optimized for AMD CPUs even before new consoles and it perform perfectly smoothly on them. So it doesn't matter that Havok is being developed by Intel because it doesn't favor Intel's CPUs.