BorsMistral said:Let me start by saying that I don't care about vendor specific tech at all. The Witcher is a great series and I I want it well optimized for any kind of hardware, so that the maximum number of gamers can fully enjoy it and CDP can rake in some serious, well deserved cash.
That being said, there seem to be a few misconceptions in this thread.
- TressFX is vendor agnostic, it uses DirectCompute. AMD isn't locking to it's own hardware and the tech runs on nV cards without issues. Oh, and it can do hair, fur and grass just as easily.
- Mantle support would be nice. If done properly you'd probably see 10% to 20% or more increase in performance compared to DX11... or at least that's what they say, we'll see when the BF4 patch comes. Again, I'd rather have TW3 itself optimized to run well on all hardware.
- PhysX... let's see... The software version of it, that in games with PhysX you can use on non-nV systems, is purposefully hobbled with the only goal being boosting nV GPU sales (which we may not like, but is an OK thing to do in capitalism). Also, there are a bunch of alternatives, from Havoc to open source ones like Bullet. In the end, Physx does look nice and could be considered worth it in some situations, but it's in essence a vendor-centric sales tool.
So CDP, please, less locked technologies and more goodness that everyone can enjoy.
The claim that CPU PhysX is or ever was deliberately crippled is FUD. Spreading FUD about one's competitors is also a common behavior in capitalism, but nothing like a worthy one.
The use of 8087 floating point was a decision that was necessary at the time, because PhysX existed before support of the SSE instruction set became common. It was not removed until recent versions of PhysX, which now implement proper multithreaded floating point.
But since no games with PhysX support are being released with those old versions of PhysX, old claims are meaningless, and continuing to repeat old claims is FUD.