Witcher 3 Dev says Nvidia HairWorks unoptimizable for AMD GPUs

Nvidia HairWorks unoptimizable for AMD GPUs

| Source: CD Projekt Forums Author: Mark Campbell

Witcher 3 Dev says Nvidia HairWorks unoptimizable for AMD GPUs

Nvidia's GameWorks Library has always been controversial, being called a "Black Box" by both devs and hardware vendors in the past and being seen by many of us on the PC hardware scene as a way for Nvidia to work in an anti-competitive manner if they wish.

While the GameWorks library does place into the hands of developers a great collection of graphical tools and can greatly simplify game development, however the fact that these libraries are closed to most of it's users makes it a difficult thing to optumise for if you are not using an Nvidia GPU.

Here is a statement made by CD Project's Marcin Momot, claiming that Nvidia's HairWorks code cannot be optimized to perform well on AMD GPUs;

"Many of you have asked us if AMD Radeon GPUs would be able to run NVIDIA’s HairWorks technology – the answer is yes! However, unsatisfactory performance may be experienced as the code of this feature cannot be optimized for AMD products. Radeon users are encouraged to disable NVIDIA HairWorks if the performance is below expectations."

Marcin Momot's statement is not regarding Nvidia's GameWorks "black Box" nature, as CD Project do have access to the libraries source code, however even with such access CD Project Red were unable to optimize HairWorks on order to play nicely with AMD GPUs, giving Nvidia a distinct advantage when playing the Witcher 3. The feature may be hard coded to not work well with AMD GPUs, rather than simply unoptimized.

There is a chance that AMD will release a driver update which will help AMD perform better when using HairWorks, but without access to the programs code it may take some time.

Like many other titles which use GameWorks, Nvidia are the performance leaders, but this again raises the question of Nvidia artificially giving their GPUs an advantage over the competition. Nvidia need to promote fairness with their GameWork's Library for it to be truly beneficial to the gaming world, as right now it is doing a great job of promoting Nvidia over AMD, via questionable methods, rather than simpler game development.

You can join the discussion on Nvidia's HairWorks being unoptimizable on AMD products on the OC3D Forums.

Witcher 3 Dev says Nvidia HairWorks tech is unoptimizable for AMD GPUs, encouraging Radeon users to disable the feature... Posted by OC3D on Friday, 15 May 2015 Witcher 3 Dev says Nvidia HairWorks tech is unoptimizable for AMD GPUs. http://t.co/HaRgIy0DOq pic.twitter.com/YWTI6u7t9x — OC3D (@OC3D) May 15, 2015

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