AMD Working on Better Witcher 3, Project CARS Drivers

[Steven Bogos]

AMD Working on Better Witcher 3, Project CARS Drivers

AMD has just created a new beta driver aimed at better optimizing The Witcher 3 and Project CARS.

If you've been following the great graphics card wars recently, you'd know that AMD cards are not performing too well [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/140859-Witcher-3-AMD-Performance-Sabotaged-By-Nvidia] on recently released titles The Witcher 3 and Project CARS. While AMD was quick to call rival Nvidia out for foul play, it is nonetheless striving to improve its performance on said games.

"To that end, we are creating AMD Catalyst™ 15.5 Beta to optimize performance for these titles, and we will continue to work closely with their developers to improve quality and performance," wrote AMD in a support post [http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/The-Witcher3.aspx]. "We will release AMD Catalyst™ 15.5 Beta on our website as soon as it is available."

In the meantime, users experiencing performance issues with the "HairWorks" feature in The Witcher 3 are encouraged to enable the below settings in AMD Catalyst™:



At the moment, we're not quite sure exactly how the issues surrounding The Witcher 3 and AMD cards came to be. AMD claimed Nvidia deliberately sabotaged them, but Nvidia is claiming it had the full co-operation of CD Projekt Red in implementing its GameWorks features. As mudslinging is not uncommon between these two companies, we may never know the truth.

Source: AMD [http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/The-Witcher3.aspx]



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[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

The Witcher 3 runs great on my R9 280x. I'm not using HairWorks though, but other than that it's a dream. In fact, Nvidia users have been complaining about freezing, stuttering and all kinds of things. By all accounts it actually runs better on AMD.

 

[kurupt87]

HairWorks ruins performance on my 770. Turn it off and you can basically have everything else on max and it runs like a dream.

Hell, even the "optimised settings" that GeForce experience (nVidia software) recommends has HairWorks turned off.

 

[VladG]

The Witcher 3 runs great on my R9 280x. I'm not using HairWorks though, but other than that it's a dream. In fact, Nvidia users have been complaining about freezing, stuttering and all kinds of things. By all accounts it actually runs better on AMD.

I run it on a 280X as well and without hairworks I can almost max out the graphics (I keep shadows on high instead of ultra and have disabled motion blur because I don't like it) and I get ~50-60 FPS at 1080p, no issues of any kind

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Hmmm. The three people above me say Witcher 3 runs great on either companies' cards without HairWorks turned on. Reports have been made of Nvidia's cards also suffering noticeable framerate drops with HairWorks active And just now, after accusing Nvidia of doing shady things, AMD saying "derp, we are now working on better dwivers." I'm betting that HairWorks is just another trivial eye candy feature that hogs resources, and AMD just thought it was their turn to talk shit in the eternal GPU politics war.

captcha: Knowledge Base
Yeah, Captcha, maybe you should build a knowledge base of this BS that goes back and forth between AMD and Nvidia. It might be useful for when I shop for a new card in a year.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I can even run HairWorks on full with that AMD tweak, but it drops my fps to mid 40's which pisses me off. That's more than playable for a lot of people, but it honestly doesn't look that good to justify playing below 60fps.

Anyway, if AMD can make the game run even better with new drivers that's great.

 

[VanQ]

My GTX980 is running every setting at max and I haven't dropped below 90fps in the last 15hrs I spent playing. I DO have it installed to my SSD though, so perhaps that's a big help on this matter. I tried recording gameplay and capped my fps at 60fps for recording and the raw footage is coming out quite nicely.

It's not piracy so I'm not sure if mentioning that I even enabled SweetFX is worth mod wrath because the devs did disable that so that PC wasn't getting a superior experience to consoles (gotta convince the console gamers that their money wasn't an absolute waste) and the stability hasn't been affected whatsoever.

Game is gorgeous and runs wonderfully on my end. Hopefully the AMD bugs get ironed out soon.

 

[whatever55]

the issue is that nvidia game works prevents developers that use it to optimize for AMD products, it's absolute bullshit in my humble opinion
while the game currently runs perfectly fine on 280/290 it's only doing so without nvidia hairworks and it does seem to run better on nvidia products.
why is that? because if you want to use a feature from gameworks like nvidia hairworks you're literally not allowed to optimize it to AMD products. CDPR admitted as much themselves.
this is disgusting unprofessional behaviour imho.
and before people say i'm pro AMD i got witcher 3 on my ps4 (console pleb reporting in) however this type of behaviour should not simply be ignored.

 

[Bat Vader]

the issue is that nvidia game works prevents developers that use it to optimize for AMD products, it's absolute bullshit in my humble opinion
while the game currently runs perfectly fine on 280/290 it's only doing so without nvidia hairworks and it does seem to run better on nvidia products.
why is that? because if you want to use a feature from gameworks like nvidia hairworks you're literally not allowed to optimize it to AMD products. CDPR admitted as much themselves.
this is disgusting unprofessional behaviour imho.
and before people say i'm pro AMD i got witcher 3 on my ps4 (console pleb reporting in) however this type of behaviour should not simply be ignored.

Couldn't CDPR just optimize it anyway for AMD and tell Nvidia to deal with it?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

What does Nvidia sabotaging AMD have to do with the price of tea in China? Just because Nvidia did one thing, does not mean that AMD cannot strive to improve the efficacy of their drivers regarding HairWorks. It's just inordinately hard for them to do so since Nvidia are a bunch of complete dickcheeses.

The price of tea in China dictates how much of an ass each company is to one another. All I was saying is I noticed that HairWorks seems to be hard on both brands of GPU, and AMD should have just been the gentleman of the two and kept the accusations of foul play internal until they can publicly prove it.

I should have posted that thought in the thread for the other article about AMD. But, I noticed it hear, and this article did have plenty of info about AMD's whining.

This is just the status quo of the GPU world. I'm sure months later Nvidia will whine about AMD, which will probably be even more baseless considering their slightly lesser influence, and then both companies will produces driver fixes for whatever issue came up.

 

[Laughing Man]

HairWorks ruins performance on my 770. Turn it off and you can basically have everything else on max and it runs like a dream.

Hell, even the "optimised settings" that GeForce experience (nVidia software) recommends has HairWorks turned off

The game also has issue with Kepler cards, then again running a 980GTX with everything on, including hairworks I am getting over 60FPS constant, so what do I care. As for the folk defending AMD for their bullshit blame Nvidia. I would suggest that they read this article posted from Forbes over at Guru 3D, it's true and frankly from a so called high end tech company blaming someone else for not having their own shit in order, well it's pathetic, even more so when you consider that a community modder has managed to fix the issue with hairworks that the so called experts at AMD still haven't gotten round to resolving.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=399313

 

[Rellik San]

I too also run a 280x. Everything on max, gets a little framey in some cut scene transitions but game play wise hovers around the 57-60fps mark.

 

[Colt47]

Yeah, though they recommend a gtx 970 or radeon 290x The game runs excellent on a GTX 7970 with overclock. I think the recommended settings were set up to include hair works, which is an unpolished technology eating up tons of resources much like the original Direct X 10 was with World of Warcraft. Great new shiny water effects that just happen to drop the frame rate of the game into the ground like the original orgrammar and Ironforge Auction Houses.

Eventually, if the technology proves useful and not a gimmick we will see it bundled without a settings option in the future, but I got a feeling this technology is going to be like TresFX.

 

[whatever55]

Couldn't CDPR just optimize it anyway for AMD and tell Nvidia to deal with it?

nope according to AMD (and implied by the CDPR response) nvidia refuses to allow any developer that uses any part of gameworks to optimize that part of the game to any card that isn't nvidia.
to do so would be breach of contract and nvidia will just take you to court.

 

[Strazdas]

I'm betting that HairWorks is just another trivial eye candy feature that hogs resources, and AMD just thought it was their turn to talk shit in the eternal GPU politics war.

Hairworks is hair physics simulation that considers every hair a seperate object that it has to MSAAx8 and tesselate. Its a MASSIVE resource hog for (admittedly very pretty at times) eye candy. Thing is, most technologies started like that. take 10 years into the future when our cards can do this easily and youll have pretty hairs on people and animals.

Couldn't CDPR just optimize it anyway for AMD and tell Nvidia to deal with it?

no, because CDPR does not have access to Hairworks source code, so they could not optimize it even if they wanted to.

What does Nvidia sabotaging AMD

[Citation needed]

 

[Bat Vader]

Couldn't CDPR just optimize it anyway for AMD and tell Nvidia to deal with it?

nope according to AMD (and implied by the CDPR response) nvidia refuses to allow any developer that uses any part of gameworks to optimize that part of the game to any card that isn't nvidia.
to do so would be breach of contract and nvidia will just take you to court.

This is why I hate Nvidia as a company. AMD seems to be the more popular under dog while Nvidia seems to be the soulless corporate monster. Plus Nvidia charges an insane amount for some of their cards whereas AMD's card do close to exactly the same thing and are affordable.

 

[whatever55]

AMD's card do close to exactly the same thing and are affordable.

to be fair while their performance on none nvidia gameworks related games are usually the same AMD cards are infamous for needing more wattage and being a lot hotted then nvidia cards.