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The Way it's not Meant to be Played


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Posted

Ian McNaughton goes out against The Way it's Meant to be Played

AMD prides itself on supporting open standards and our goal is to advance PC gaming regardless whether people purchase our products.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares our philosophy. Nvidia has recently sampled some newly released The Way it is Meant to be Played titles, including Batman: Arkham Asylum, to press in hopes that they would use these titles to benchmark against the HD Radeon 5870 and 5850. There are some known issues with these proprietary TWIMTBP titles.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

In this game, Nvidia has an in-game option for AA, whereas, gamers using ATI Graphics Cards are required to force AA on in the Catalyst Control Center.

The advantage of in-game AA is that the engine can run AA selectively on scenes whereas Forced AA in CCC is required to use brute force to apply AA on every scene and object, requiring much more work.

Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced. This option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure rom.

To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory …

Need for Speed: Shift

In another TWIMTBP title, we submitted a list of issues that we discovered during the games’ development. These issues include inefficiencies in how the game engine worked with our hardware in addition to real bugs, etc.. We have sent this list to the developer for review. .

Unfortunately you will be unable to get a fair playing experience with our hardware until the developer releases a patch to address and fix our reported issues.

Resident Evil 5

AMD was unable to receive builds of this game early enough to get a chance to test and address any open issues. We will work with the developer to test and adjust any compatibility or performance issues that we encounter.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2009/09/11/at ... ould-care/

Nvidia responds to Batman:AA

NVIDIA statement on Batman AA

A representative of AMD recently claimed that NVIDIA interfered with anti-aliasing (AA) support for Batman: Arkham Asylum on AMD cards. They also claimed that NVIDIA’s The Way It’s Meant to be Played Program prevents AMD from working with developers for those games.

Both of these claims are NOT true. Batman is based on Unreal Engine 3, which does not natively support anti-aliasing. We worked closely with Eidos to add AA and QA the feature on GeForce. Nothing prevented AMD from doing the same thing.

Games in The Way It’s Meant to be Played are not exclusive to NVIDIA. AMD can also contact developers and work with them.

We are proud of the work we do in The Way It’s Meant to be Played. We work hard to deliver kickass, game-changing features in PC games like PhysX, AA, and 3D Vision for games like Batman. If AMD wants to deliver innovation for PC games then we encourage them to roll up their sleeves and do the same.

NVIDIA Developer Relations

Rocksteady response on Batmans AA problem:

The form of anti-aliasing implemented in Batman: Arkham Asylum uses features specific to NVIDIA cards. However, we are aware some users have managed to hack AA into the demo on ATI cards. We are speaking with ATI/AMD now to make sure it’s easier to enable some form of AA in the final game.
Posted

Sounds to me like AMD is whining. If what NVIDIA is saying is true, then they helped out Rocksteady implement AA into UE3, which, being NVIDIA, of course they're going to show them their way of doing things. If the feature is not guaranteed to (but it _might_) preform on ATI cards because of code "hacks" NVIDIA has, then of course you're not going to let ATI card uses use that option because there's a risk of it not working. An option on the in-game menu means "we support this option". If they didn't actually implement and test it, but put it in anyway, the phones would be ringing off the hook from pissed off ATI users about their game crashing.

As a software developer, I'd rather have people call me complaining about something that's not there, rather than something that's there but broken.

Posted

I dunno, I really hate that alot of games today dont support AA, and most console games are released without it, while 5 years ago I was playing all my games with AA. Feels like a step backwards in graphics :(.. flickering pixels on edges = ugly.

Posted

Yeah for sure, but these days I'm more interested in gameplay than graphics, I really don't spend the time to look for artifacts anymore :P It could be the fact I never really had a pc powerful enough to play games at high res and use AA, would always prefer better frame rate.

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