Enter the Dragon Punch
Banned
Weve just learned that no one at AMD was informed by Microsoft that review codes were being handed out to journalists for performance testing earlier this week and only found out after the fact.
We have also tested the game again with the newly released patch. This patch was intended to fix the visual corruption issue with ambient occlusion turned on. However, it appears that all this patch does to address the issue is forcibly disable Ambient Occlusion, even if enabled through the menu.
In the case of Gears of War Ultimate Edition it was Nvidias proprietary HBAO+ GameWorks feature listed under a generic name. In fact we only learned that the ambient occlusion implementation in Gears of War : Ultimate Edition was in fact HBAO+ when Nvidias Andrew Burnes announced the availability of Game Ready drivers on the GeForce.com blog and named it as one of the games features.
Simply turning off ambient occlusion in the settings will completely resolve the artifacting that we witnessed while testing the AMD Radeon R9 Nano and R9 380 graphics cards.
As it turns out HBAO+ wasnt the only thing hidden behind a veil. Whilst digging into the games files a friend of WCCF youtuber Blindrun spotted a very interesting hidden game file. The file is BaseEngine.ini and it can be found in the following folder path on Windows 10 : CrogramFilesWindowsAppsMicrosoft.DeltaPC_1.6.0.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbweEngineConfig
The WindowsApps folder is windows protected. Which you means that youll have to jump through some hoops to actually access it.
In BaseEngine.ini we spotted a very peculiar entry. bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=False. More peculiar is the fact that this file cannot be edited in anyway. If it is, the game will simply overwrite any changes once its booted up and connected to Microsofts servers.
The entry means that hardware accelerated PhysX is enabled by default in the game and because any changes to the file are overwritten automatically upon game start-up means it cant be disabled. For those of you unaware PhysX is Nvidias proprietary game physics engine and can only be accelerated by Nvidias own graphics cards. If a competing GPU is detected by the PhysX driver, the work will instead be automatically offloaded onto the CPU. This in turn means that the feature will run disproportionately slower on non Nvidia equipped systems.
Additionally, because hardware accelerated PhysX features are only visual and arent part of the games core mechanics ;disabling them would not affect the games behavior in any way. Sadly because we are unable to turn off hardware acceleration in Gears of War Ultimate Edition we dont know what its actually doing. And whether it could account for some of the performance disparity were seeing between Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Right now we simply dont know what effect it has because we simply cant test it.
tl;dr ambient occlusion is actually nvidias hbao+ despite being unlabeled in game (AMD users either play with a broken game or get no ambient occlusion), and physx is forced on at all times with no way to turn it off or know what it does for performance thanks to microsoft's total control over windows store apps
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks-visual-corruption-gears-war-ultimate-edition/
old? searched nvidia in thread titles but didn't find anything about this, and i figure it's big enough news to be seperate from the PC performance thread
reminds me of the tesselation in crysis 2
I'm worried we're gonna see more of this, not less, as time goes on and Nvidia grows even stronger
definitely feeling replacing my 970 with whatever flagship AMD launches at 13 inches or under this year
or apparently it's only MS fault? my bad