Indeed and indeed! And full points for reminding me of good old 3Dfx. Voodoo Monster Power, baby! Man, I hope AMD doesn't go down, this market needs competition so badly.
Indeed and indeed! And full points for reminding me of good old 3Dfx. Voodoo Monster Power, baby! Man, I hope AMD doesn't go down, this market needs competition so badly.
Is there any reason in particular why AMD hasn't come up with its own equivalent of Nvidia's PhysX and other GameWorks components? I mean, I get that people are upset about the fact that AMD's GPUs can't run all of Nvidia's proprietary technologies, but what's stopping AMD from developing their own technologies?
R&D needs money, AMD is (to put it lightly) in a very bad condition right now financially speaking.
Aside from that, I guess they also need the talent specifically for middleware if they want to do that, maybe they don't have too much of that?
AMD's much larger than nVidia, and they have the talent to come up with Mantle. But it's one thing to have a Really Good Idea and a very different thing to make commercial products that implement that idea. The latter takes time and costs money, more than exceptional talent. When your management is putting most of its effort into making sure you're still a going concern six months from now, product R&D isn't first in their mindset.
Totally this. At least on a small business level, and I'd bet absolutely on a larger level. Actually, I know for sure on a larger level.
The gap between a Good Idea, even a Plan For A Good Idea, and it hitting shelves or your Google Ads or whatever, is a loooooong and risky process. As I know only too well. And a lot of it has to be bridged without a lot of proof of success, ambitious business plans or design docs notwithstanding.
The thing is, investors and managers are risk-adverse. If the business is in a transition or shakeup period, even more so. Risk is such a nebulous thing, it can haunt any deal or presentation, so the only ideas that make it very far tend to be the ones that are the safest OR are powered by some driven and lucky visionaries.
To have an edge over Nvidia AMD can go fully open source with their drivers. I.e. merging catalyst with Gallium3D radeon.
What edge might that be? Adoption of their drivers by customers who do not pay them anything for the effort to produce, maintain, and support them?
nVidia has invested a lot of their intellectual and financial capital in developing graphics hardware and middleware that is actually used by customers who are only too glad to pay full value for them, because they can use them immediately to produce profitable products and services.
It does not matter whether a product is free, its specifications are public, or its source code is open. What matters is whether it can be used profitably by your customers.
nVidia has invested a lot of their intellectual and financial capital in developing graphics hardware and middleware that is actually used by customers who are only too glad to pay full value for them, because they can use them immediately to produce profitable products and services.
It does not matter whether a product is free, its specifications are public, or its source code is open. What matters is whether it can be used profitably by your customers.
For instance better support in Steam Machines. Right now AMD is used in high end closed gaming consoles like PS4, but on Linux they are still behind. To offer something more attractive than Nvidia their only bet is supporting an open driver, like Intel do. Then they might become the preferable choice for the newcomers to the console market (Asus, Dell and the like). Otherwise I expect Nvidia to be the choice number one in those upcoming Linux consoles. And that's something that AMD are probably pondering now. They already made several steps in direction of opening their driver (more than Nvidia for sure).
Intel for example invest effort in their hardware as well, but they don't consider keeping their drivers open a hindrance.
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What is the forecast sales of Steam Machines, and Witcher 3 on Steam Machine, over the commercial life of the game? It's not a matter of being more fair or open, or even technically superior; it's a matter of can you make this at a profit that justifies the expense, and can you deliver this on a schedule that does not delay revenue or shorten the life of the product?
Solutions you can get and use now is where this competition has been, is being, and will be played out. Nobody who is a newcomer to the console business is fool enough to favor open source that adds months or years to development cycles because the product you need right now has not yet been written, nobody is being paid to write it, and your competitor already bought and integrated it.
Open-sourcing drivers is a Good Thing but really doesn't figure into that calculation. If nVidia wanted to squash AMD's or Intel's potential advantage in open-source drivers, all they would have to do is open-source theirs. But it doesn't change the real engineering problem and the market for solutions, which is this: You write the game to use a toolkit and an API that are at a much higher level and much less effort than writing to use the drivers; by doing this, you get your game to market before your competitors at less cost, and you make more sales over a longer product life.
I really hope AMD gets a big win with Mantle and a lot of adoptions, and a lot of toolkits and APIs come out for it. Because if they don't, this game is just going to get more and more one-sided.
Solutions you can get and use now is where this competition has been, is being, and will be played out. Nobody who is a newcomer to the console business is fool enough to favor open source that adds months or years to development cycles because the product you need right now has not yet been written, nobody is being paid to write it, and your competitor already bought and integrated it.
Open-sourcing drivers is a Good Thing but really doesn't figure into that calculation. If nVidia wanted to squash AMD's or Intel's potential advantage in open-source drivers, all they would have to do is open-source theirs. But it doesn't change the real engineering problem and the market for solutions, which is this: You write the game to use a toolkit and an API that are at a much higher level and much less effort than writing to use the drivers; by doing this, you get your game to market before your competitors at less cost, and you make more sales over a longer product life.
I really hope AMD gets a big win with Mantle and a lot of adoptions, and a lot of toolkits and APIs come out for it. Because if they don't, this game is just going to get more and more one-sided.
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I doubt anyone can forecast it now, but it's a major wildcard. AMD was pushing for OpenGL-next up to proposing Mantle for it, so they should be interested in making it work. Witcher 3 on Steam Machines is just a theoretical idea at this point, since REDengine didn't even add OpenGL support yet (at least it appears so). Sure, AMD won't open things for the sake of being open, they might open them if they'll see it as beneficial and giving them something extra against competition.
Why, AMD's Catalyst is already written as well as radeon. It shouldn't take them insane amount of time to merge them (in whatever way) and polish up to supporting OpenGL 4.5, Mantle and beyond. Of course if they have money for that. If they are in dare financial situation - they might worry about other matters, rather than trying to compete in emerging console markets.
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First, there's the matter of programming to drivers. Programmers whose time is valuable (that is, they are being paid out of R&D money to produce a working product on time and on budget) write to the simplest API they can, and that API is never drivers unless they are writing embedded code for new hardware. That's why I said open source drivers aren't the answer to the important question, which is what can I use to produce working code now?
I don't mean to sound flippant about this; this is completely serious.
If you don't have a forecast for sales, say, on Steambox, how are you going to convince your VP of Engineering and your CTO that they should put the costs of developing for Steambox into your budget and the time needed to deliver on Steambox into your schedule?
This is a world in which those questions have hard, numerical answers, or they don't even get asked.
I don't mean to sound flippant about this; this is completely serious.
If you don't have a forecast for sales, say, on Steambox, how are you going to convince your VP of Engineering and your CTO that they should put the costs of developing for Steambox into your budget and the time needed to deliver on Steambox into your schedule?
This is a world in which those questions have hard, numerical answers, or they don't even get asked.
Since we have no info, I doubt we can see it the same way as let's say AMD who can have info from Valve and their partners who participate in Steam Machines production. So they might have estimates, they just aren't public. But again, it's just a guess, not any better than the one in the opposite direction. If they are in the dark, they won't risk investing into something they can't even estimate yet, unless it's some win or lose situation and they have no other choice except for going bankrupt without trying something.
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I'm an Nvidia owner and want the feature set of my card supported to its maximum capabilities. The Nvidia features are great and will make the game look and perform better.
I don't feel sorry for AMD owners, it's your choice live with it, don't cry about it.
If W3 supported Mantle and gave AMD a huge performance boost, fantastic, well done!
The worse thing that can happen is game features being gimped due to other cards not supporting them.
CDPR have the best philosophy, they are developing the game to the viable strengths of each platform.
I don't feel sorry for AMD owners, it's your choice live with it, don't cry about it.
If W3 supported Mantle and gave AMD a huge performance boost, fantastic, well done!
The worse thing that can happen is game features being gimped due to other cards not supporting them.
CDPR have the best philosophy, they are developing the game to the viable strengths of each platform.
It isn't and was never a question of support for those features, AMDs GPUs could handle all of that stuff as well - only it's Nvidia's f*cking policy to close their software for everyone else. Ultimately, this hinders the spread of those nice shiny graphics features, because not every developer is willing to implement proprietary stuff like this. Same goes for Physx. Game physics could be much farther by now, if GPU-acceleration for physics simulations were an open standard already.
I just wished they'd permanently lock Tress FX, and everything they have, just for fanbois, like that one, and never, ever look back (never allow fixes unless Nvidia rewrites the code or pushes it to a locked one or two core solution and laugh hard at them all). Make it run horrible on every Nvidia system, always, & then it will be balanced just like Nvidia fanbois FORCED it on all of us...
- - - Update - - -
It's pretty much forcing the way things are, if only the two companies would work together, but nope, bitter rivals, with one having more money to do dirtier shit to the other, that's all. I really hope this doesn't give them more to gain, hence why I was concerned to begin with. I may not love either, but there sure isn't a third viable option that isn't stupid expensive or bitterly fought by the richest. I miss those days, confusing, but more options, things weren't all set in stone yet. Sigh, hehe. Thanks for reminding me, though.
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Yep, and while we're at it we might as well convince Microsoft to make DirectX open source too. And why stop there? Let's make Speedtree open source so all games can benefit. Since businesses like to make a profit from technology they create none of these options are likely to occur despite it being beneficial to game devs.
Which is exactly why I hope they listen to fans, lock anything like Tress FX and anything further, just the same, treat the Nvidia lovers to what they support, all the time, on every title, from now on.
I think and hope for good coding to lock it to single threads even, every single in game effect they get designed from now on, best way to market, you know I'm right!
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I would have no problem with that. Currently the game I'm most looking forward to doesn't use any 3rd party software for trees, physics, etc. so it won't impact me either way. The game uses an engine that was completely designed from scratch and is more advanced than anything else currently available (PhysX, Havok, etc.).Which is exactly why I hope they listen to fans, lock anything like Tress FX and anything further, just the same, treat the Nvidia lovers to what they support, all the time, on every title, from now on.
Hell is freezing over already: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx
And it's not for fun, either.