Somethings that bothers me using Nvidia's GameWork integration in UE4 project

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi everyone!

I’ve been trying out Nvidia’s gamework features in UE4 lately (mainly hairworks), and the results are really amazing.

I really love to have those features integrated into my UE4 project, however, as I recently found out, the features that

were integrated into UE4 requires GPU which supports at least Cuda 3.0 and DX11 to run the game.

(Please correct me if I’m wrong, because I can’t find the source to that statement, however, I did try my test project on

Geforce 550TI which uses Cuda 2.1 and it can’t run, but Geforce 750(Cuda 5.0) and Geforce 680GT(Cuda 3.0) can run

without problem.)

The problem that bothers me is, as I check out the Steam hardware survey site, it shows some figures that indicate if I

integrate Gameworks feature into my project, I might lose (roughly) 62% of total potential customers!

(Website for Steam hardware survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

(Website for Nvidia’s Cuda enabled product list: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus)

(The figure 62% were caculated simply by filtering out the gpu’s that support at least cuda 3.0 and add up the percentage and then minus 100%.

The percentage I use is from 2016 August. I haven’t accounted for the GPU that does not supports DX11 but I suspect GPU that supports DX11 or

above will be prevalent when I finally finished my game.)

Which means if I uses gameworks’ feature, my game will essentially be an Nvidia exclusive game and even then, not all Nvdia’s gpu users can play

my game (33% of Nvidia’s gpu users can’t run my game!).

That’s a rather frustrating news to me, but then again, the features provided by gameworks is really really amazing and I already put quite some effort

into making it. After seeing how gameworks can do to my project, completely discard it will make me feel like my game is not “complete” any more, I

will always feel my game could be better then its current state.

I would like to hear some thoughts regarding this matter, any replies will be appreciated. Thank you.

2

Thats not entirely true. As far as I am aware, the only one that has the limitation of Cuda 3.0 is Flex (and they are working on a Direct Compute version so AMD will be usable in future). HairWorks, VXGI and HBAO+ should all work on any D3D11 card. Not sure on WaveWorks

3

Hey, thanks for the fast reply!

Do you mean if I don’t use any Flex feature in my game, then it should be free from Cuda 3.0 limitation? Or should I completely remove Flex from the source code?

Thank you.

4

I think its fine to leave in if ur not using any Flex features. It’ll just fail to load the DLL silently. But really if ur not using Flex. You should remove it.

5

Flex as mentioned above is not supported in lower versions of CUDA. One thing you can do is program on and off buttons in the visual settings for the player to toggle to turn off select GameWorks features. It will take some time to get it all working right, but the end result will be much better off for the players to customize their visual experience.

6

You could also GetGameUserSettings and auto switch as required.