Nvidia Better Than You and Knows It.

No matter if you prefer to blowup your enemies in the newest iteration of the Call of Duty franchise or if you get your explosive kicks in the new Just Cause 3. Just know that all that explosive 3rd physic rag doll fun time wouldn’t be possible with the first introduction by a company called Ageia and their PhysX card. You used to need a separate card added to your GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) to enjoy all the physics gore your teenage heart could desire. In 2008 Nvidia bought this company and added it to all of their future GPU’s for us to all enjoy with games to come. Now this works great for everyone who uses Nvidia’s GPU content, but there are lots of other GPU’s out there that cannot use the technology of PhysX such as AMD or Intel because Nvidia keeps the software exclusive for their gear. Tessellation which is the process of smoothing out pointy corners in video games for a better look and graphical feel. AMD was actually the first to jump on this with Truform, but a universal pickup of the software would not come till Microsoft’s Direct-X 11.0 was released. Ironically after AMD showed the true use of tessellation in the end it was again their cards and others that could not perform with Nvidia in mock-ups across the board with other games. This was largely due to the use of Nvidia’s graphics cards on game developers development units thus they would not notice much of a difference until they tested elsewhere.

More recently Fallout 4 was released by Bethesda Softworks in the continuation of the Fallout series. There was a direct involvement from the both companies in testing and developing the game. Thus in the end all systems with Nvidia hardware ran the game considerably better than AMD and Intel users. As both a console (PS4) and PC Master race user in my own opinion I would agree fully that anyone who is not using Nvidia’s tech is not receiving the same experience as those who are using the hardware. All is fair in love and war though as the saying goes and it is a business world that they are operating in so AMD set out to create their own patch work for this issue. Though there is no officially released patch for this currently for AMD user’s the community remains hopeful.

To close out on the issues that now AMD and Nvidia seem to have with each other, when Witcher 3 was released Nvidia claimed and created a new software called HairWorks which made the hair and fur of in-game items, people, and creatures look amazing and lifelike. Though this technology was created by Nvidia for the creators of Witcher 3 so again AMD was not able to run the software correctly as it mainly used tessellation to work. This took a hard sucker punch to AMD almost outright in the face of the company although Nvidia denies that what they did as purposeful against AMD. So AMD was forced to make another softwore just for a single game so that their users might be able to enjoy the game correctly. Tressfx is AMD’s version of HairWorks, but the large difference here is it like mostly all of AMD’s other software’s are open-source for the community to use and modify on their own granted they follow AMD’s legal guidelines. It was first released with the latest Tomb Raider game exclusively as AMD was partnered with its creators. This is the same thing that Nvidia did with Witcher 3, unlike AMD though when Tressfx was released Nvidia’s cards did suffer, but was quickly patched in less than a month versus the larger time frame that it took AMD with Witcher 3.

Nvidia likes to keep everything they do under lock and key whereas AMD is like previously mentioned largely open-source. As more and more developers continue to create the next-gen games using Nvidia’s GameWorks software for testing AMD users will continue to suffer for no known reason other than Nvidia does no want to work with AMD to create a better experience for both groups user base. Why would they though? Nvidia can use AMD’s software with any noticeable margin of error or changes, but AMD cannot replicate the same when using Nvidia’s software with their own tech. Nvidia has what they know and they are doing it better than everyone else so why share? Other than knowing that their product works and works better than the competitors there can’t be anything else.