NVIDIA Gameworks gets a lot of hate because people say that many games that release with Gameworks, release with a ton of problems and that Gameworks itself causes fps problems.
What do you guys think about Gameworks? Is it unoptimized trash? It is a godsend? Are most implementations just bad? I’m curious on what the community thinks.
The scope of this question includes every Gameworks feature from PhysX to VXGI, Flameworks, Hairworks etc.
Im happy they release GameWorks libraries to us to use, and that they try to remove the vendor lock-in from it and base things on DX.
Can I come up with f.e. VXGI on my own? I cannot. If someone elses answer is Yes I can, then he might be better of using its own.
I like to see PhysX running in UE4 with NVIDIA and AMD cards. Until that happens, gamework still something cool for play but nothing i want in my project or see in another game. You can’t make a game or other thing, if not work on AMD.
I think it’s great.
While it would be nice if it all worked on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs I don’t see the issue with making games that only run on Nvidia cards (well, other than missing out on around a quarter of the market).
Would be nice if someone with a new AMD card would grab the VXGI build so we could get an idea of the performance on new AMD hardware.
I’m fine with Nvidia stuff, the performance issues aren’t necessarily due to Gameworks stuff, it’s definitely going to take up some more processing power, but there’s things the developers have to do to be able to utilize it so that it’s not such a huge performance hit.
So is it safe to say that those who blame solely Gameworks for some gameworks-supported games launching with terrible issues to be ridiculous?
Not necessarily ridiculous—we know that some stuff can be really intensive, but take for instance the latest Batman game–while the Gameworks stuff does have an impact, it’s having performance issues with it turned off, so it’s likely that they could get it to perform better with it turned on.
And in the past, there have been games that use Nvidia technology that work just fine–like previous Batman games.
I really like their technology and think it is a level of detail enhancement that finally starts to tackle the issues with dynamics in games and often does look rather stunning. I gladly trade in 5FPS in The Witcher 3 just for those awesome hair effects on the animals. Fluffy! 
But I am still concerned how it is used rather as a marketing tool for nVidia as well as the single USP for the PC version. I don’t think thats healthy on the long run.
The Gameworks stuff is practically the latest technology. It’s not that’s it’s unoptimized (though I’m sure like anything, it can always be better) - it’s just that you need proper high-end gear to run it effectively. Hardware always takes longer to catch up than software.
VXGI, HairWorks and TXAA are all great.
It’s partly used to convince more people to buy their graphics cards, but it’s not all about that, since they’ve worked to make half of the technology work on hardware that’s not Nvidia brand. It seems that for the most part the technology only requires Nvidia hardware when they’ve specifically built a feature into the hardware that can improve the technology and it’s not a hardware improvement that they would share with their competitors.
The problem is that people who see a game has Gameworks in it, they automatically assume the game is going to launch horribly. There is also assumptions that the game will just be bad with the “same ****** nvidia software” Here are some quotes on some people about the new batman game.
So the main assumptions here is that performance WILL be terrible, the game WILL launch broken, and that the developers are lazy for using Gameworks. I know Gameworks can cause framerate due to the intensive tasks, but usually these are already optional. My concern is people just blaming Gameworks for the downfall of the whole game when the Batman game has issues side from it. And like you said, previous batman games work fine.
Gameworks really isn’t the problem, the problem is that developers will work with just one vendor and call it a day or work with both then completely ruin one vendors performance and say oh well. They don’t take time to truly polish their game. They don’t keep other vendors and even same vendors on older hardware in their mind throughout the lifetime of the product.
BUT Soon, very very soon we will have mix and matched vendors in systems, thanks to dx12 and vulkan. We will all be able to grab an amd / nvidia jam them both in and call it a day giving us access to gameworks and things like tressfx making it so that it wont matter as much what gpu you have as long as you have both amd and nvidia.
Dx12/Vulkan will make huge strides into making this a nonissue, as long as your willing to jam a bit of red next to that green, or vise versa.
Oh Im really sure the Vendors will assure that this will not work the way you think now. 
Shhhhh… let me live in my own little world. lol.
Seriously though you think they would stop gameworks from running if you had a team red next to a team green ? This brings up interesting topics…
It’s weird that people would complain that way about Gameworks–it’s optional, if the features run poorly on your system then you can turn them off
The issue with this line of thought comes up when tech like this adds something quantifiable to the experience, which no doubt something like VXGI would for the average game.
I think with VXGI you just have to make sure to have an alternative if the system isn’t powerful enough for it. In my current project I plan to have VXGI, but it won’t be essential.
Well things change fast I guess, now they prepare lots of libraries to work on all vendors cards, so maybe we come to a point where one can really play one game with two different vendor cards harnessing both’s power at once. DX12/Vulvan gen or the next after. It would be great.
I guess its a bit of a fight between the techs wanting to create great things and management trying to protect their buisness even by “unfair” means.
Gameworks really isn’t the problem, the problem is that developers will work with just one vendor and call it a day or work with both then completely ruin one vendors performance and say oh well. They don’t take time to truly polish their game. They don’t keep other vendors and even same vendors on older hardware in their mind throughout the lifetime of the product.
BUT Soon, very very soon we will have mix and matched vendors in systems, thanks to dx12 and vulkan. We will all be able to grab an amd / nvidia jam them both in and call it a day giving us access to gameworks and things like tressfx making it so that it wont matter as much what gpu you have as long as you have both amd and nvidia.
Dx12/Vulkan will make huge strides into making this a nonissue, as long as your willing to jam a bit of red next to that green, or vise versa.
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I really do have faith in DX12 and Vulkan to help make the experience even between AMD and NVIDIA users. A sudden thought just entered my mind - Unity 5 and UE4 both use PhysX 3.3 for handling a lot of their physics. Does this mean both engines have an automatic bias towards NVIDIA users? I would think and hope the implementation of something so widely used like PhysX would be implemented to work well with both cards. On top of this though, certain features are locked from AMD users. Mainly very fancy special particles though. I’d also like to think about what if Epic had a physics system that worked independently of PhysX and could they get it running just as good or better on both vendors.
As far as UE4 is concerned, Epic has made sure that PhysX does not use any features that only work on Nvidia graphics cards, their purpose is for the engine to run well all around. That means stuff like GPU acceleration for PhysX is not in UE4.