AMD Say Nvidia "completely sabotaged our performance" with HairWorks

AMD Say Nvidia Sabotaged AMD's Performance.

| Source: Forbes Author: Mark Campbell

AMD Say Nvidia "completely sabotaged our performance" with HairWorks

AMD Say that Nvidia "completely sabotaged our performance" with HairWorks by forcing much more of a performance hit than is required by the affect.

AMD's chief gaming scientist, Richard Huddy, said that Nvidia had deliberately sabotaged AMD performance with their GameWorks code, saying this to Arstechnica;

“We’ve been working with CD Projekt Red from the beginning. We’ve been giving them detailed feedback all the way through. Around two months before release, or thereabouts, the GameWorks code arrived with HairWorks, and it completely sabotaged our performance as far as we’re concerned. We were running well before that… it’s wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.“

As many of you know, players of the Witcher 3 have been able to dramatically decrease the performance hit of Nvidia's HairWorks by limiting the amount of tessellation it uses.

By default the affect uses 64x tesselation, which places significant load on the GPU. This especially hurts AMD GPUs as AMD's GPUs have significantly less Tessellation performance than Nvidia's equivalents.

Looking at the screenshots below, which shows HairWorks running on the Witcher 3 at 8x, 16x and it's default 64x tessellation, showing that after 16x tessellation the visual difference is barely noticeable, making it look like Nvidia have purposefully increase the tessellation on the affect to make the affect hit AMD GPUs much harder than theirs.

using 64x tessellation is a double edged sword however as it increases the load of users of AMD and Nvidia GPUs, so performance is decreased for both brands, just one is hit much harder than the other.

(Images from WCCFtech)

HairWorks is no doubt a brilliant affect to use, as it really increases the realism of every creature and character which uses it, Nvidia needs to explain why such a high level of tessellation is used in the affect as looking at the pictures above it could have a 4x decrease and still look as good.

AMD have been working on their tessellation performance in recent years, with their new Tonga, GCN 1.2 architecture doubling its performance under tessellated loads, though right now AMD have only one GPU using this architecture. AMD will need to refresh their high end lineup soon with new silicon to decrease the affect of these kinds of issues in the future, but right now the Witcher 3's issues look like a combination of known performance differences between AMD and Nvidia which have been taken advantage off in a very dirty way.

You can join the discussion on AMD's Sabotaged performance in the Witcher 3 on the OC3D Forums.

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