I have to say that I am also worried about this. Worse performance on consoles and a lot of the PCs around is not something the majority of developers are happy to accept I believe.
This was proven by NVidia themselves along with some of the game companies themselves that got accused of preferring Nvidia > AMD. Nvidia Fires Back: The Truth About GameWorks, AMD Optimization, and 'Watch Dogs'
I don’t think this is something to get worried about. Yes, Nvidia may have something that works very well, but if it only works properly on half the PC GPUs, and none of the console GPUs, then devs aren’t going to use it.
Epic are the gatekeepers here, and they want their engine to be as hardware-agnostic. I say we are safe.
Well I don’t know how far that would work, but wouldn’t it just possible to pre-integrate Nvidia’s GameWorks without enabling it by default? So developer who want to use those features, but don’t have the required programming skills or programmer for that, still could use it by activating for example a plugin that contains PhysX or ShadowWorks. From my perspective I would be happy to offer Nvidia User’s the ability to use GameWorks, just as much as I would like to offer AMD Users to utilize Mantle, but that’s my view. I am leaving consoles out, since I personally don’t care about them.
I think the best bet would be to offer the option and leaving the decision making to the developers themselves.
+1 Seems fair so… A question- if someone grabs the source code from Gameworks, could he integrate its features in a plugin for UE4 ? Does Nvidia stops him from doing so ?
But what would you do with the greater performance?
Would you a) use the freed-up processing power to put more in the game, which means non-Nvidia players can’t play it. (Otherwise, why would you go to the effort of freeing it up?)
Or b) Just leave the freed-up processing power unused, so Nvidia users use less power. (A bit of a waste of dev time, if you ask me.)
There is a reason that PhysX-enabled games just used pointless cosmetic stuff like Batman’s cloak, or sheets waving in the wind.
Don’t get me wrong, Gameworks looks great, and I love Nvidia anyway, but there comes a point when things are just not worth supporting, and that point is usually “when it is proprietary and unique”.
Nvidia has integration for UE4, so if you want to use Gameworks then it’s probably just a case of contacting them and working out how to do that.
If you want a feature, you can make the choice to add it to your game and whether or not it matters to you if it’s something that not all people can use.
Is that right? They have in house integrations?
If so, that’s pretty awesome. May have to bug someone there about them.
That was what the confusion was about, it was reported that Gameworks was integrated with UE4, but that just meant that Nvidia have done the stuff on their end to support it, maybe like a plugin. UE4 doesn’t actually include it by default though which was what the reports didn’t understand.
To ATI and AMD I say to bad so sad.
This is the way things work in the free market system and if Intel and Nvidia do the things they have to do to continue to give their customers the best products and experience possible I say all the better for everyone.
Lets face the facts here guys that Intel and Nvidia combo comes with a heavy price tag and there will be huge performance difference as compared to the macaroni and chess being offered by AMD and ATI.
I’m not saying this as a bad thing but if the difference as to the experience you are looking for is based on the ideals that one is a casual gamer as compared to the ideals of professional gaming in general, which by definition is “expensive” your not going to get a everyday driver with the same performance envelope as Formula 1 race car.
If anything I would argue the opposite perspective that in fact low end requirements is holding back cutting edge technology from reaching max performance envelopes if only we are considering a video game as being marketable product.
In other words you go out and buy a $800 dollar video card and there is not a single game available that takes advantage of the huge performance boost, which is the very reason you bought it in the first place, until five years later or until the lowest common denominator catches up.
Whats needed here is not crying over some company that can’t keep up to the demands of the market place but consumers demanding that if “they” want to be competitive then they have to up their game to the standards of “supply and demand” and consumers becoming better educated as to what they are buying for the reason they buy in the first place.
So
If you show up on race day with a soccer mom MPV your going to get a whooping unless you have something under the hood that’s a bit more then a 4 banger.
Just saying 
Those of us willing to pay for the good stuff pay the price for less that perfection in a game title if that title has to serve and be sold to the lower end market.
The game that I want is the one that makes me want to go out and buy new hardware. o/
I wouldn’t consider AMD graphics cards that way anymore though, they’ve definitely improved greatly and that’s probably why they’re at 40% market share and not lower
Aye, I knew UE4 wasn’t using it.
I just didn’t know NVIDIA had their own integrations for the engine.
Man, I was typing out one long post nobody’d read. I’ma just shorten it.
Instead of fighting over which GPU company has worse practices, why don’t you consider the possibility that if a game comes out heavily optimized for one card family and not the other, that the developers may have simply screwed up and didn’t optimize properly? There’s only so much driver optimizations can do (and believe me, they can do A LOT; look at how nVidia’s driver optimizations with DirectX 11 eventually outperformed AMD’s mantle in Thief 2014), and if driver optimizations don’t fix the problem after a couple months, especially if it’s a higher profile game, then let’s look at the devs for neglecting one card family, no?