Rooting for your favorite graphic card giant is a primary part of any PC Enthusiast, but while it is almost customary for a tech enthusiast to do so, it is less becoming for the giants themselves to engage in low blows and PR Battles. The recent tit-for-tat PR Battle being fought between AMD and Nvidia is about Mantle Titles and the Game Works Library. Both Red and Green are trying their level best to gain the upper hand in being seen as the champion of PC Gaming, but they only thing they are currently achieving is making the trolls reach for popcorn.
Nvidia and AMD's PR Team Exchanges Low Blows to be seen as the Champion of the PC Gaming World
Although it would seem unintuitive, I guess basic information about the spat is in order. Sometime ago AMD accused Nvidia of using the Game Works library in a negative way. Basically they said that Nvidia was making Game Works completely optimized to run on Nvidia Geforce cards while doing absolutely nothing about Radeon cards. The result is obviously that Game Works titles will perform superiorly on Geforce cards. Nvidia denies this accusation but fairly speaking there is no way to verify Nvidia's claims because Game Works is a proprietary library and its code is not available to the public. Therefore any optimization has to be done by Team Green themselves. An admittedly tricky situation with no actual way to verify anything, apart from Game Works becoming open, which isn't happening. However when AMD's Robert Hallock accused Nvidia of optimizing Watch Dogs primarily for Geforce cards, Nvidia revealed a counter statement which said that the source code in question wasn't actually necessary for driver optimization and AMD's accusation s were just PR attacks. Here is the detailed response taken from Forbes.com:
“Most developers don’t give you the source code. You don’t need source code of the game itself to do optimization for those games. AMD’s been saying for awhile that without access to the source code it’s impossible to optimize. That’s crazy.” - Cem Cebenoyan, Director of Engineering, Developer Technology, Nvidia GameWorks
So thats one side of the story. On the other hand, Nvidia claims that if AMD spent as much time working on their drivers as they did about them, they would have far less issues. AMD replied that they have a large working list of Mantle Titles, to which Nvidia replied that they couldn't possibly release such a list because their list was so far reaching (Alright I know this is immature, but oh burn. ). AMD also apparently turned down Intel's demand of wanting access to Mantle saying that they will have to wait till the public release sometime later this year. So at this moment Mantle API isnt fully public either. There are way too many verbal spats going on right now between these two giants, but I am honestly not sure what to make of it. Logic dictates that any rivalry between two companies is better for consumers, but in this case, I am not really sure. If this continues and games are bifurcated towards one specific GPU vendor and a Xbox-PlayStation exclusive like situation arises, what becomes of the PC Master Race then?
This #AMD vs #Nvidia PR spat is getting out of hand, at this rate we will get an xbox-playstation situation on PC :/ http://t.co/X5cQFCrQBj
— Usman Pirzada (@usmanpirzada) June 27, 2014
