Nvidia's GameWorks causing issues for AMD users in Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

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

fucking christ. piss poor job by both MS and Nvidia here.

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

The problem is that you're making a thread based on a random WCCFTech rumor/clickbait article.

Using WCCFTech as a "tech" source is about as accurate as using VG Chartz as a "sales" source.

Limited to Nvidia AO solution and locked PhysX, oh come on!

This Windows 10 store is looking more and more like a worse GFWL, and we all know how that ended up. Its PR disaster after PR disaster.

Get your shit together and stop treating PC gamers like shit whilst pretending you care.

I'm actually loving this. Durante took a load of shit in one of the previous UWA threads for being opposed to the whole platform due to restrictions on mods. People were telling him that it was rare that mods are needed to fix a game and they tend to be for niche titles or Japanese developed games.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195507497&postcount=2384

And now look, we are on what, just our 2nd major release on the Windows store and it has issues that could likely be fixed with a simple mod that changes the configuration of the physx and AO settings for AMD users to allow them to play while we wait for a patch.

It's a good thing that kind of issues can be fixed vy accessing the game fil... Nevermind :")

But, but i thought, since it´s UWA now and they can´t depend on modders to fix their games, everything would be great now? No more broken games....

We we´re told that. Right here on gaf.

It's funnier because it's a 1st party game, from the owner of the OS, owner of the so called great ecosystem, maker of the so called great app format, maker of the API its using.

Another great commitment and here we'll have people telling us to wait for actions, that previous mistakes are a thing of the past.

Except, it's a not a PhysX issue. Which would have been obvious if the thread wasn't sourced from such an unreliable site.

These entry are standard in the unreal engine .ini, is there more (A benchmark with/without modified .ini?) aside speculation and conspiration theory?

Speculation and conspiracy theories are how WCCFTech gets traffic. The site has a long history of posting unreliable info and sometimes just making stuff up for hits.

This game does not use GPU Physx.


Yeah, PhysX is a general purpose physics system. The makers even tried to sell specific dedicated physics cards prior to nVidia purchasing them.

Isn't Physx just part of UE3? Yup, it is. This is kind of bullshit, guys.
Now, maybe the AO part is true. And I can't tell, since HBAO+ runs better on AMD, lol.

Read the post, Gears UE is software Physx for everyone. No hardware accelerated Physx.

You misunderstood, the PhysX in Unreal 3/4 is run software on the CPU and has absolutely nothing do with anything GPU related nor could possbily have an implication on vendor specific performance. It's never run on GPU hardware.

The effects in BL2 or similar have nothing to do with the PhysX used for collision physics.

These posts sum it up well.
 
think they mean not happy with the game itself not saying it's an NVIDIA thing since all other GameWorks games have that stuff pointed out

We don't know if that is a licensing requirement, I'm sure it is mentioned in the game credits. Other games that typically make a big deal out of it are usually bundled by Nvidia.
 
The problem is that you're making a thread based on a random WCCFTech rumor/clickbait article.

Using WCCFTech as a "tech" source is about as accurate as using VG Chartz as a "sales" source.













Except, it's a not a PhysX issue. Which would have been obvious if the thread wasn't sourced from such an unreliable site.



Speculation and conspiracy theories are how WCCFTech gets traffic. The site has a long history of posting unreliable info and sometimes just making stuff up for hits.













These posts sum it up well.

Even if it's "only" an AO problem my point still stands. Even more so as you don't even need to mod a game to inject AO in a lot of cases.
 
The problem is that you're making a thread based on a random WCCFTech rumor/clickbait article.

Using WCCFTech as a "tech" source is about as accurate as using VG Chartz as a "sales" source.










Except, it's a not a PhysX issue. Which would have been obvious if the thread wasn't sourced from such an unreliable site.



Speculation and conspiracy theories are how WCCFTech gets traffic. The site has a long history of posting unreliable info and sometimes just making stuff up for hits.









These posts sum it up well.

If WFFCtech is a bad source, mods can feel free to close to thread - I genuinely didn't know it was a ********-tier source. My apologies.
 
do you have a link to what they said?, didnt know it was considered a myth either

Maldo's blog on it

Sadly all the Crymod links are hard to find since they have remade the website since then (from Crymod, to Crydev, to Cryengine now), but it basically boils down to this. The original "article" (I say it in quotes, because it was so poorly thought out and researched) pointed out all of its evidence by using the CryEngine's wireframe mode. The thing is, wireframe mode disables LODs, distance scaling, and occlusion culling. So things like the tessellated ocean, and the distance at which tessellation factors ramped up were completely blown out of proportion. They were much more conservative in the real game.

This on top of the fact that those "highly tessellated barriers" are not even using an expensive form of tessellation: Phong Tessellation.

Likewise, anyone these days can just load up Crysis 2 with maldo's mod and toggle tessellation, reduced tessellation, or tessellation off to see how inexpensive it actually was on all hardware. So many other things introduced in the DX11 update were killing performance on most cards, not the tessellation.

The funny thing is that I end up writing this exact same post every couple of months as this pops up to this day. It just says a lot about how myths propogate and maintain their hold. It is easier to write untruths than to research truths I guess.
 
I think the issue is more that the One version had async compute for SSAO. Yet the feature is missing on PC that was coded with DX12. And suspicious replaced with in GAF's mind a superior HBAO+ nvidia peddles in all their games especially creators of the quickly outdated Maxwell GPUs that have problems with async compute... Hmm...
 
I think the issue is more that the One version had async compute for SSAO. Yet the feature is missing on PC that was coded with DX12. And suspicious replaced with in GAF's mind a superior HBAO+ nvidia peddles in all their games especially creators of the quickly outdated Maxwell GPUs that have problems with async compute... Hmm...

HBAO+ does not melt asynchronous beams.
 
I've been busy in real life with work related things, but it sounds like I want to stay away from buying any games from the Windows 10 store, huh?
 
For as much as NVIDIA invited some of the suspicion around their programmes, the amount of FUD thrown around about NVIDIA stuff is insane.

People need to take a step back and try and do some objective measurements before jumping on this sort of stuff.
 
In theory, would it be possible to disable PhysX in memory via cheat-engine? Pretty crappy solution, but I think it would work...

Edit: Welp, this is what I get for not reading the thread properly.
 
I've been busy in real life with work related things, but it sounds like I want to stay away from buying any games from the Windows 10 store, huh?

It's going to be on a case-by-case basis.

To an extent, I wonder if Microsoft rushed this port out because they appear to not have notified Nvidia or AMD before sending out review code.
 
For as much as NVIDIA invited some of the suspicion around their programmes, the amount of FUD thrown around about NVIDIA stuff is insane.

People need to take a step back and try and do some objective measurements before jumping on this sort of stuff.

When there's SmokeWorks™, there's FireWorks™
 
I'm actually loving this. Durante took a load of shit in one of the previous UWA threads for being opposed to the whole platform due to restrictions on mods. People were telling him that it was rare that mods are needed to fix a game and they tend to be for niche titles or Japanese developed games.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195507497&postcount=2384

And now look, we are on what, just our 2nd major release on the Windows store and it has issues that could likely be fixed with a simple mod that changes the configuration of the physx and AO settings for AMD users to allow them to play while we wait for a patch.
But all you have to do is ask the developers nicely for tools to fix their games, guys! (some dumb fuck actually said this. Troll, console fanboy or astroturfer. I dunno.)
 
HBAO+ does not melt asynchronous beams.

Yes and I can see why they do it most GPU are far more power than console to just use vanilla HBAO+. But it's certainly strange that asynchronous compute is started to get omitted in the PC versions of games which Nvidia just happens to sponsor. Especially after the fact of shitstorm of Nvidia not leading in DX12 technology. Just makes you think but of course majority of owners here are nvidia owned so nothing questioned.
 
I think the issue is more that the One version had async compute for SSAO
Source please. Only element I can dig up is The Coalition contemplating using async compute for AO in an Eurogamer interview.
EDIT :
Command list creation and D3D resource creation are the big focus here. We’re also pulling in optimisations from UE4 where possible, such as pipeline state object caching. On the GPU side, we’ve converted SSAO to make use of async compute and are exploring the same for other features, like MSAA

Read more: http://wccftech.com/gears-war-ultim...evs-explain-dx12-async-compute/#ixzz429UPKMtf
No evidence it has been used on Xbox One like you pretend, however it seems they had an implementation at some point in time, why has not it been used in the final release I don't know.
Likewise MSAA has not made it either.

Yet the feature is missing on PC that was coded with DX12. And suspicious replaced with in GAF's mind a superior HBAO+ nvidia peddles in all their games especially creators of the quickly outdated Maxwell GPUs that have problems with async compute... Hmm...
1) It is widely accepted HBAO+ is the best screen space AO available.
2) In what way are Maxwell GPUs "outdated" ?
 
Source please. Only element I can dig up is The Coalition contemplating using async compute for AO in an Eurogamer interview.


1) It is widely accepted HBAO+ is the best screen space AO available.
2) In what way are Maxwell GPUs "outdated" ?

1.HBAO+ is the best looking, but it does not jive with AMD.
2.Maxwell does not support Asynchronous processing.
 
1.HBAO+ is the best looking, but it does not jive with AMD.
2.Maxwell does not support Asynchronous processing.

1) HBAO+ works fine on AMD cards in many other games. Sometimes, it's even cheaper.
2) One feature missing by no means equals "outdated". Otherwise how would you call AMD cards lacking features such as conservative rasterization or rastered ordered views ?

The anti Nvidia bias is strong.
 
But it's certainly strange that asynchronous compute is started to get omitted in the PC versions of games which Nvidia just happens to sponsor. Especially after the fact of shitstorm of Nvidia not leading in DX12 technology. Just makes you think but of course majority of owners here are nvidia owned so nothing questioned.
There's nothing shady going here; AsyncCompute isn't a standard multiplatform feature for the RHI on UE4, and the implementation is only available on XBO. The feature was actually done by Lionhead, but Epic decided integrate it to UE4 as it can be a powerful tool for developing well performing games.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/lates...ing/ShaderDevelopment/AsyncCompute/index.html

It does say the feature should eventually become available as a multiplatform tool, but as of right now it's not. Maybe as part of the RHI 2.0 on the roadmap: https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap
 
Maldo's blog on it

Sadly all the Crymod links are hard to find since they have remade the website since then (from Crymod, to Crydev, to Cryengine now), but it basically boils down to this. The original "article" (I say it in quotes, because it was so poorly thought out and researched) pointed out all of its evidence by using the CryEngine's wireframe mode. The thing is, wireframe mode disables LODs, distance scaling, and occlusion culling. So things like the tessellated ocean, and the distance at which tessellation factors ramped up were completely blown out of proportion. They were much more conservative in the real game.

This on top of the fact that those "highly tessellated barriers" are not even using an expensive form of tessellation: Phong Tessellation.

Likewise, anyone these days can just load up Crysis 2 with maldo's mod and toggle tessellation, reduced tessellation, or tessellation off to see how inexpensive it actually was on all hardware. So many other things introduced in the DX11 update were killing performance on most cards, not the tessellation.

The funny thing is that I end up writing this exact same post every couple of months as this pops up to this day. It just says a lot about how myths propogate and maintain their hold. It is easier to write untruths than to research truths I guess.

thats really good to know thanks, seems like they didnt bother to update the article or provide the responses to it either which is just bad form, i doubt many people care at this point since the damage has been done
 
If WFFCtech is a bad source, mods can feel free to close to thread - I genuinely didn't know it was a ********-tier source. My apologies.

Yeah, it's not a banned site, but it is the equivalent of a supermarket tabloid.

That's why, as you noted in your OP, you hadn't seen this mentioned elsewhere.

They may occasionally post something accurate, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
 
The funny thing is that I end up writing this exact same post every couple of months as this pops up to this day. It just says a lot about how myths propogate and maintain their hold. It is easier to write untruths than to research truths I guess.

Very true. Many forumites still think that Treasure was made up of an ex-Konami superteam that worked on Hard Corps and Castlevania IV, lol.
 
I think the issue is more that the One version had async compute for SSAO. Yet the feature is missing on PC that was coded with DX12. And suspicious replaced with in GAF's mind a superior HBAO+ nvidia peddles in all their games especially creators of the quickly outdated Maxwell GPUs that have problems with async compute... Hmm...
Yes and I can see why they do it most GPU are far more power than console to just use vanilla HBAO+. But it's certainly strange that asynchronous compute is started to get omitted in the PC versions of games which Nvidia just happens to sponsor. Especially after the fact of shitstorm of Nvidia not leading in DX12 technology. Just makes you think but of course majority of owners here are nvidia owned so nothing questioned.

GoWUE PC has nothing to do with NV. Whatever decisions were made on it were made by The Coalition / MS themselves.

1.HBAO+ is the best looking, but it does not jive with AMD.
2.Maxwell does not support Asynchronous processing.

Both of these points are false.
 
What's funny here is that the original Gears of War for Windows also had a problem where an update for GFWL broke the game and made it so you couldn't launch it and a patch was issued to fix that.

Gears of War is like the microcosm of what is wrong with MS and PC gaming and why most PC gamers would like MS to just fuck off from PC gaming and leave us alone.
 
In this thread, we go at each other's throats over nothing instead of focusing on the simple fact that this is just a suckass port of a game.
 
What's funny here is that the original Gears of War for Windows also had a problem where an update for GFWL broke the game and made it so you couldn't launch it and a patch was issued to fix that.

Gears of War is like the microcosm of what is wrong with MS and PC gaming and why most PC gamers would like MS to just fuck off from PC gaming and leave us alone.

Yep. And on the flip side, the first thing that ran through my mind when this news dropped was, "...and this is exactly why PC gaming isn't likely to completely replace console gaming anytime soon." There seems to be quite a bit of speculation about how MS putting their games on the PC depletes the Xbones market but I just don't see it. PC gaming is still generally too much of a pain in the ass for the vast majority of gamers out there who want the reliability and ease of use of a console where you turn it on and for the most part it just works.
 
Must be Microsoft fault, if they had released this game on Steam and Ps4 that wouldn't have happened

If this game was released as normal Windows software instead of an app, people could go into the config files to find settings to make these issues less of a problem. It's still Unreal Engine so there's plenty of hidden settings. So yes, if they had released this on Steam, this would be much less of a problem!

But because this is a Windows 10 app so it cannot be modded, we are out of luck.
 
I'm actually loving this. Durante took a load of shit in one of the previous UWA threads for being opposed to the whole platform due to restrictions on mods. People were telling him that it was rare that mods are needed to fix a game and they tend to be for niche titles or Japanese developed games.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195507497&postcount=2384

And now look, we are on what, just our 2nd major release on the Windows store and it has issues that could likely be fixed with a simple mod that changes the configuration of the physx and AO settings for AMD users to allow them to play while we wait for a patch.

Holy shit was that dude for real?
 
Why? Is a banned site or we have evidence that they misinform? Just to know.. i read that site sometimes.

Not banned, but consistently misinforming or giving false information. Also see the Tim Sweeney thread earlier today and their outright abysmal article on the topic that not only makes misleading statements and narrative of the situation but also fundamentally misunderstands PC gaming.
 
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
Truely, they are committed to PC gaming.

Seriously though, all this UWA bullshit is killing my hype boner over Killer Instinct.
 
Even though Nvidia doesn't have a hand in how Microsoft making their game they do have a hand in how their drivers are implemented.

CPU accelerated PhysX was proven by David Kanter to be purposefully gimped by using an outdated instruction set when ran on a CPU. If it actually was running on an instruction set that has been around for 2 decades an Intel CPU could run physx even better than Nvidia's gpus.

There also isn't any excuse for the type of degradation we are seeing when an AMD gpu runs HBAO.

Nvidia basically set up a trap to make AMD cards look worse than they normally would and MS played into their hands and thus spreading the idea that AMD can't make decent enough drivers to accommodate 3rd party code.
 
Even though Nvidia doesn't have a hand in how Microsoft making their game they do have a hand in how their drivers are implemented.

CPU accelerated PhysX was proven by David Kanter to be purposefully gimped by using an outdated instruction set when ran on a CPU. If it actually was running on an instruction set that has been around for 2 decades an Intel CPU could run physx even better than Nvidia's gpus.

There also isn't any excuse for the type of degradation we are seeing when an AMD gpu runs HBAO.

Nvidia basically set up a trap to make AMD cards look worse than they normally would and MS played into their hands and thus spreading the idea that AMD can't make decent enough drivers to accommodate 3rd party code.

GPU Physx on the CPU is horribly inefficient, but CPU Physx is not. Gears is the latter.

I don't believe Nvidia set any trap, this is The Coalition's doing and possibly AMD's drivers fault.
 
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