Eh. This is par for the course.
Ever seen those 'best played with nvidia' things? (The way it's meant to be played or some such thing?)
That sounds like a good thing right?
Well, not really. It means the developer got a cash incentive and technical support from Nvidia.
That's all well and good of course, but Nvidia has a vested interest in ensuring that whatever that game implements kinda breaks AMD cards...
Now, the Devs themselves don't actually like that, because, obviously, if half the gamers that might buy your game can't play it because the code Nvidia handed you breaks your game on their systems that's going to hurt you in the long run...
But, guess what? Nvidia likes it of course. Especially since gamers often fail to see what's really happened, and blame AMD for 'broken drivers', 'bad performance' and so on.
Now, that's not to say AMD is innocent. They certainly attempted to pull the same trick often enough (especially back in the ATI days). But they don't seem to have as much money to throw at it, so they often seem to get the short end of the stick.
There's also this: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/ex-nvidia-driver-developer-on-why-every-triple-a-games-ship-broken-multi-gpus/
There's more to that specific rant than the article is quoting, but what it comes down to is this:
Games don't work. They are, most of the time, released in a state that violates basic rules about how graphics cards actually work.
What happens is, Nvidia and AMD identify what game is running, then actively fix every mistake the game is making at the driver level before handing the fixed code to the GPU...
This happens partly by accident, but part of it is that DirectX and OpenGL are so abstract and convoluted it's almost impossible to code something that actually works correctly from the point of view of the actual 3d rendering hardware.
Which means... The drivers contain millions of lines of convoluted code to deal with a million different edge cases of things that just don't work right, and jiggling all the game code around into a state that's actually capable of running...
No wonder the open-source AMD linux drivers are so bad...
Driver writing is clearly not as simple as it sounds, and in fact sounds like the worst kind of convoluted nightmare you could possibly face as a programmer;
Messy, unelegant code, full of special cases, multiple code paths, conditional code execution and all other kinds of seriously nasty stuff...
It's a small miracle any of it works at all if it's that bad...
Steven Bogos said:
tween 30 and 60 FPS is like night and day.
I do, however, agree that anything above 60 FPS isn't really necessary.
It's nessesary for VR. Essential even. 60fps is a
bare minimum[/i]. As in, letting the framerate drop below 60fps, ever is not a good idea.
But... VR is an edge case.
Sure, framerates (or rather, input-display latency, to get at the heart of the issue) in VR are not just nice to have, but critical to avoiding people becoming sick while playing, but, as should be clear, VR is very much a niche thing. (for now anyway. Who can predict the future)
