Nvidia responds to Batman:AA

[flippin_waffles]

Gamervivek, +2. Who knows how nv's DX11 hardware will work. It's software approach might completely flop, contrary to all of DilTech's campaigning on nv's behalf. It might do ok in titles from the makers of Assasin's Creed and Batman though. Or more on point, ATi hardware will be crippled to create the illusion that nv hardware is performing at a higher FPS.

[sbattosai]

Hello everyone, this is my first post. I have been reading XS for years but this Batman AA story just made me very mad. PC gaming is dying, it's an obvious statement, and now both GPU makers are doing an open war?? how stupid is that, dividing the consumers won't help any company. I am very happy that we have currently two major GPU makers, I am very happy that NVIDIA is very innovative with PhysX, Cuda, GPGPU and so on, but I really hate the way they do business sometimes.
Stephane Charpentier (Ex Matbe.com, the chap doing the monster PSU round up a few years ago, 108) wrote in French, quoting

"Sauf que la vérité serait que Nvidia a aidé les développeurs à implémenter l'anti-aliaisng dans le jeu en utilisant des fonctions basiques de DirectX et qu'en échange de ce coup de main, la firme américaine aurait demandé à ce que l'anti-aliasing reste une exclusivité des GeForce dans Batman, bien que ce soit entièrement fonctionnel pour les Radeon. Il s'agirait donc bien d'une limitation intentionnelle."

http://www.pcworld.fr/reactions/ati-...50021/#comment

Which would translate into: "except that the truth would be that NVIDIA helped the devs to implement AA in Batman:AA by using basic Direct X functions, and as an exchange for this help, the American company would have asked that AA remains a Geforce exclusivity in Batman, even though it is perfectly working for the Radeons. Thus it would be an intentional limitation."

Then you add the fact that they disabled PhysX for the owners of a Radeon+ Geforce for PhysX and then you have some bad business reputations. i am amzed that people are actually trying to justify such a condemnable behavior. they did wrong, they got caught, end of the story. AA is usable via CCC for ATI and since the cards are powerful enough, it's not a problem at all. The only problem is for reviewers during a bench, they should bench the cards without AA. For the rest, it's not such a big deal, the game is great, even on Radeons without PhysX. let's chill, let's play, this is not the first time this happened, nor the last time.

Just my 2 cents.

[Tim]

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15793/1/

Pretty much sums up my sentiments.

[jaredpace]

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15793/1/

Pretty much sums up my sentiments.

Did you know people with ATi cards (only) are running Batman:AA with MSAA & Physx?

[highoctane]

It might do ok in titles from the makers of Assasin's Creed and Batman though. Or more on point, ATi hardware will be crippled to create the illusion that nv hardware is performing at a higher FPS.

This is where we keep bringing up ATI needs to work closer with the developers to insure their hardware will be utilized to the fullest extent to ensure their customer satisfaction. Whether its a lazy developer or one line of code this is the point where somebody at ATI needs to do what needs to be done to ensure they support the developers in the same way with the same aggressiveness as Nvidia for their customers sake.

Nvidia seems to be working very aggressively with the developers to make sure their hardware is utilized which is a valued added service to its customers. Someone purchasing nvidia hardware has some sense of support when buying a piece of nvidia hardware because nvidia obviously reinvests a significant amount of money into the very market that uses their hardware via developer support to make sure their hardware is utilized optimally.

Complaining isn't the solution, the solution is going to come from ATI collaborating with the developer on a resolution, not writing in a blog.

[Lane-k]

The problem is AA work with ATI card on Batman.. at the moment you fired the code who detect ATI card, its easy you just need to remove this from the ini.. well it was work in demo, no more in release ( thanks to the Securerom)... there's nothing to do with " working with developer "

[Final8ty]

They should not of let the game run at all on ATI hardware seeing as they had no time to test the game on ATI cards.

[Trembledust]

your right that consoles have similar situations, and with the ideas expressed in this thread it sounds like people are scared the PCs will follow the same path.

with consoles we do see games that work for both, and games that are exclusive, and the funny part is, the kind of uprising we see when one company who use to be exclusive, starts to design multi platform games (SquareEnix comes to mind). for games that work on both, differences are usually negligible, but we do have cases where there is a difference (does anyone know of any titles that are on PS3/360 where one was massively favored over the other? i dont keep up with consoles enough)

i still believe people are too scared a company will let themselves suffer profit loses to favor a company, and if they mess up big enough, reviews will show it, and sales will be hurt big time. look what happened on here over ingame AA, when you still have a work around by enabling it in CCC. (what kind of perf loss was noticed between the two methods?)

Ummm when the alleged "next gen" consoles first came out I remember frame rate issues with Madden. 360 was 60 fps and ps3 was 30 fps. EA indicated something about not getting the dev kit for ps3 in time or something to that degree...cant remember exactly what it was but thats the reason they indicated the ps3 version only ran at 30 fps. Which made EA look lazy since at the same time Infinity Ward dropped COD4 which ran 60fps on both consoles. For a lil while atleast the friends I had who were more sports video gamers and playstation fans switched over to the 360. That and the fact the playstation 3 library was thin.

Now its not so much the case. Both the ps3 and 360 versions of Madden run at 60 fps. Well cap at 60 fps. The latest games for both consoles really dont have an advantage to their competition except 360 games seem to deal with lighting, and shadows better, and have less jaggies then the ps3 versions. But in some cases the differences are minimal. Like take for example Street Fighter IV. Gametrailers did a ps3 / 360 comparison of the game and u can notice the difference but they arent deal breakers.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/ps...-fighter/46276

Personally I play shooters more then anything and prefer the 360 controller vs. the ps3 controller in that aspect. The 360 controller feels better suited to shooters then the ps3 controller. Of course kb&m own both controllers when it comes to shooters.

And the point about there being uproar when a dev / publisher who was exclusive for one console but now are multiplatform (Square Enix like u mentioned earlier, Rockstar with GTA IV) I think thats more a fanboy thing then anything. I'd be like Gears of War or Halo suddenly being offered on Playstation 3 or God of War, and UnCharted 2 being avaliable for Xbox 360. U'd hear the fanboys just go at it which makes me laugh cause ummm...most of these fanboys dont own stock, or work for the companies in question, and its not like the games are not being made avaliable to the console they have so why are u upset?

[Lane-k]

They should not of let the game run at all on ATI hardware seeing as they had no time to test the game on ATI cards.

lol..

[Trembledust]

On multi platform console games the most recent game that specifically favored one platform was Batman: AA(ironic, isn't it) which lets you play as the Joker for specific challenges on the PS3 as DLC which won't be released on the x360.

Oh im sorry. I quoted earlier indicating there really isnt a favored platform for certain games but I was assuming the person who posted was refering to performance and what not. If you are talking about DLC and the lot then...

Batman as u mentioned for ps3 lets u play as the Joker in the challenge maps vs. 360 that doesnt. Thats just Sony getting the exclusive rights for the Joker playable. Not sure whether its a timed exclusive or not but doesnt look like u will ever be able to play as the Joker on Xbox 360 or pc...well pc if U mod the skin u can lol

GTA IV...Xbox 360 has the exclusive episodic DLC's which sony does not. First one was Lost and Damned. The second upcoming is the Ballad of Gay Tony (yes we all laughed when we first heard the title lol). Rumor is MS paid 50 million to have those episodes exclusive to Xbox 360. I dont ever see them coming to PS3 if MS shelled out that much doe for the episodes.

Those are the two big ones. Well then there is Fallout 3 which seems to have expansion packs for the xbox 360 and PC first then PS3. I think thats more a coding issue with the devs and ps3 hardware so they indicate. I think PS3 is finally getting DLC for Fallout that was avaliable for pc and 360 like 2 mnths ago.

[Trembledust]

Joker playable only on nvidia hardware !!! : 'why only nvidia ? cause ati didn't support us when we created joker scenario'.... I really expect such things from now on

Well would make sense. Joker has green in his outfit. Nvidia's base color is green.

[JoeBar]

They should enable a destruction mechanism that trigger the moment u hit play, with ATI cards. A small portion of TNT would be enough...


Much cheaper than working with game developers...

[Trembledust]

ha ha i got the game code free,today i installed the game played for 1hour and it thuoght jeez you can have it,then i uninstall game nobodys missing anything.
todays games are so god awful its enuogh to just get a console and dont buy into this crap,and for me to say that is very bad hating consoles.
nobody wants a game that runs 150fps+ plays well+ great online play but just looks "good" so they got to sell it to you good.

U can have it? U must not be into stealth action games, or the fact that the game only has a single player campaign turned u off cause Batman Arkyum Asylum is a solid game. Its the best Batman game to date IMO.

What games do u play mostly? I'm serious. I'm not being a smart a$$.

I do feel your point on capping games at 60 - 62fps. I had a thread about capping with Street Fighter IV. I caught a lil heat because I felt the pc version should not be capped at all. People telling me if the game wasnt capped at 60 it would be too fast. Wha??? Im sorry if u use to games breaking 100fps + 60 is gonna seem slow to u. Thats what happened to me when I played the console version of COD4 vs. the pc version. But anyways u get my point.

[Manicdan]

GTA IV...Xbox 360 has the exclusive episodic DLC's which sony does not. First one was Lost and Damned. The second upcoming is the Ballad of Gay Tony (yes we all laughed when we first heard the title lol). Rumor is MS paid 50 million to have those episodes exclusive to Xbox 360. I dont ever see them coming to PS3 if MS shelled out that much doe for the episodes.

wow i hope thats not true. i saw those commercials 20x a day, and never knew it was only DLC for xbox. what a waste of time without throwing up a xbox symbol at the end of it.

[Trembledust]

Well I just played the demo and found myself performing crazy manoeuvres without doing anything except clicking constantly. Not exactly exhilarating.

It gets more complex the deeper u get into the game. The early stages of combat seem like just regular button mashing but thats just a warm up to get u to get down the basics. Its gets really more complex as the game progresses.

[Trembledust]

adding/improving ut3 aa support is great!
but why did you implement a mechanism that checks the manufacturer of the card and basically blocks everybody else from using it...?

i understand that nvidia doesnt want to do the hard work for ati, but hiding features, and even implementing a sophisticated hw check to prevent people from using aa on non nvidia hardware is over the top.

not helping each other is fine and understandeable, but when you guys, ati and nvidia, start to purposely cripple and break games for the competition, things have really gone too far...

just call it "Nvidia AA mode" or grey it out and people need to manually edit a config file to enable AA... thats good enough!
its annoying for ati customers and emberassing for ati... thats fine, nobody can complain about that, nvidia gets its fame and can show it delivers better support to its customers, at least in this game... and all is good...

but locking non nvidia users out is really lame... you dont make any friends that way, and i doubt you end up with happy customers that way either...

I hear what u are saying and again there maybe basis for a lawsuit if what u say is tru with Nvidia blocking features, but not for nothing ATI should of responded with some kind of fix to enable the blocked features or contacted Rocksteady and say hey...umm mind working with us on a patch to enable AA on our cards too?

I'm not well versed in coding, and i'm basically a noob compared to some of the members of this forum when it comes to pc hardware, but seems like an obvious thing to do unless they really didnt care about the game in the first place and /or maybe had their sights set on other IPs. I haven't heard anything from AMD / ATI on whether or not they will try to resolve the lack of AA support in the game. The article I read kinda gave the indication that they dont plan on doing anything about it. I apologize if ATI has recently come out and said they are working on ways to implement AA in the game.

http://www.techpowerup.com/104868/Ba...PCs.html?cp=10

[Farinorco]

I hear what u are saying and again there maybe basis for a lawsuit if what u say is tru with Nvidia blocking features, but not for nothing ATI should of responded with some kind of fix to enable the blocked features or contacted Rocksteady and say hey...umm mind working with us on a patch to enable AA on our cards too?

I'm not well versed in coding, and i'm basically a noob compared to some of the members of this forum when it comes to pc hardware, but seems like an obvious thing to do unless they really didnt care about the game in the first place and /or maybe had their sights set on other IPs. I haven't heard anything from AMD / ATI on whether or not they will try to resolve the lack of AA support in the game. The article I read kinda gave the indication that they dont plan on doing anything about it. I apologize if ATI has recently come out and said they are working on ways to implement AA in the game.

http://www.techpowerup.com/104868/Ba...PCs.html?cp=10

And why should ATi be working on a patch of that game?

If the game doesn't support AA with ATi cards it's not ATi's fault, but developers fault. They are who program the game, they are the ones who has to provide the features of the game.

If there was a problem of drivers, then it would be a thing on the ATi side, and they should be working to fix it on their drivers. BUT the game doesn't have AA in ATi cards because the UE3 don't have AA, and the developers were too lazy to implement their own custom filter. Ooooops, no. The game doesn't have AA in ATi cards because the developers DID implement it (in colaboration with their official supporters, NVIDIA) and then made a check to not allow running that code if an ATI card is detected on the system.

[Trembledust]

Oh my bad, why the hell did i think it was running on UE3... bleh...

Alotta people actually thought COD4 was using UE3. Dont feel too bad lol

[zalbard]

If the game doesn't support AA with ATi cards it's not ATi's fault, but developers fault. They are who program the game, they are the ones who has to provide the features of the game.

I'm tempted to agree.
Hardware developers are supposed to adapt their hardware to games, not make games by themselves...

[AbelJemka]

So let me get this straight, This game did not have AA, Nv came along and helped them make AA work on there hardware but did not spend any time/money validating it for there competition. So what's the problem again?

I will not say it's anormal but i say it scare me a lot.
What next NV or ATI come to a developper, code i don't know all the DX11, AA, HDR, what you want of the game and say "i help coding this part so i want this to only work with my hardware".
What we will do?
For me it will be the beginning of the exclusivity like in console market : that will suck

the point is nobody is innocent.
and the saying goes " innocent until proven guilty" only applies to US
real world everybody is guilty until proven innocent.

I don't know in which world you live

[Tim]

Did you know people with ATi cards (only) are running Batman:AA with MSAA & Physx?

Pretty much proves that AMD can do it, but they just didn't support the dev.

[Trembledust]

ok, then what about all the bugs that ati and nvidia help devs to iron out?

how about a game detecting that a card is vendor A and vendor B helped to iron out bugs, so the card from vendor A will use an older render path and possibly use older buggy dlls or files that cause bugs and stuttering and crashes and freezes, artifacts... you name it...

its only fair cause vendor B helped to debug the game, so they can demand that it only runs in the debugged mode they helped to create on their own cards right? and when is something a bug and when is it a feature? do game devs not care about aa? they obviously want it, but its broken in ut3, its buggy... so nvidia helped to fix the bug... and now they want this bug to only be fixed on their hardware...

dont you see how ridiculous this is?
if they dont cut the cr4p intel will be the smiling third party that everybody turns to, including game devs, cause EVERYBODY is fed up with this childish bickering between ati and nvidia...

around once a year it escalates for some reason and every single time everybody gets completely fed up with BOTH sides and it backfires on both companies... yet they never learn and keep doing this...

and worse, they keep pulling third parties into this nonsense, the press, game devs, other hw makers...

Hey sounds kinda personal there @ HW makers. Nvidia try to muscle u into including a NF200 chip on the Bloodrage when u were with Foxconn? lol.

Man listen..U know Intel is rubbing their hands over this whole issue between Ati and Nv saying..."Excellent"

Ok my fault. I really should learn how to multi quote. Sry bout the back to back to back to back to back posts lol

[Sadasius]

Did you know people with ATi cards (only) are running Batman:AA with MSAA & Physx?

And the funny part is that it runs better then with Nvidia cards! That's why Nvidia needs to shut their competition up by sabotaging as much code as they can because that is embarrassing as hell!

[Trembledust]

wow i hope thats not true. i saw those commercials 20x a day, and never knew it was only DLC for xbox. what a waste of time without throwing up a xbox symbol at the end of it.

Oh its 100% tru @ GTA IV DLC. U are not seeing the DLC episodes for PS3 ANYTIME soon if ever. I thought they did? @ throw up an xbox symbol at the end on the commercials. I probably overlooked it cause I know its Xbox 360 exclusive.

Here are two trailers for the upcoming DLC. Last 5 seconds of the vids u see the xbox 360 symbol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGaCC...rom=PL&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiM9k...aynext_from=PL

[VoodooProphetII]

And the funny part is that it runs better then with Nvidia cards! That's why Nvidia needs to shut their competition up by sabotaging as much code as they can because that is embarrassing as hell!

Well at least it works.