The Witcher 3’s HairWorks debacle: GPU parity is rather silly

NVIDIA GameWorks is easily one of the strongest arguments for getting an NVIDIA card over an AMD one.

Even in cases where AMD cards match or exceed NVIDIA’s, NVIDIA has had far superior drivers as well as exclusive technology baked into their cards for some time now. GameWorks is the best example of that.

One of the more noticeable and talked about components of the GameWorks suite is HairWorks, a technology that does exactly what it says on the tin.

HairWorks enables games to simulate hair and fur to absurd levels of detail and interaction. We’re talking self-shadowing, body to hair shadow casting, wind interaction, real-time physics calculations and even grooming. And it’s become kind of a big deal in CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 3.

You can’t tell us that you weren’t impressed.

And with NVIDIA’s latest Game Ready Drivers, The Witcher 3 is going to perform even better on Geforce cards.

It’s an impressive piece of tech that any gamer would love to see working on their personal copy of The Witcher 3. Rather unfortunately, as a piece of NVIDIA tech, HairWorks and AMD cards don’t play well together.

That’s not to say that AMD Radeon cards can’t use HairWorks, they definitely can. According to CD Projekt RED employee Marcin Momot, it’s possible:

Many of you have asked us if AMD Radeon GPUs would be able to run NVIDIA’s HairWorks technology – the answer is yes! However, unsatisfactory performance may be experienced as the code of this feature cannot be optimized for AMD products. Radeon users are encouraged to disable NVIDIA HairWorks if the performance is below expectations.”

That should really be it. It makes perfect sense that AMD cards will suck the big one at running software developed for the alternative GPU brand, doesn’t it?

The story is actually a lot more complex than that. Suffice it to say, once upon a time, NVIDIA implemented policies and practices that actively hindered Intel and AMD from competing with them on games that used GameWorks – something NVIDIA deny of course.

It makes little sense for any developer to obligate themselves into ruining the experience for a large portion of their market. CD Projekt RED is a company at the end of the day, and they’d be screwing with their profit margins by denying AMD the proper tools to effectively optimise the game for their cards.

Even in the case where NIVDIA was guilty, a huge outcry alongside the accusations forced NVIDIA into an open policy.

With the history of GameWorks brought into question, PC Perspective interviewed NVIDIA, asking for clarification on the state of HairWorks in The Witcher 3, to which NVIDIA replied:

“We are not asking game developers do anything unethical.
 
GameWorks improves the visual quality of games running on GeForce for our customers.  It does not impair performance on competing hardware.
 
Demanding source code access to all our cool technology is an attempt to deflect their performance issues. Giving away your IP, your source code, is uncommon for anyone in the industry, including middleware providers and game developers. Most of the time we optimize games based on binary builds, not source code.
 
GameWorks licenses follow standard industry practice.  GameWorks source code is provided to developers that request it under license, but they can’t redistribute our source code to anyone who does not have a license. 
 
The bottom line is AMD’s tessellation performance is not very good and there is not a lot NVIDIA can/should do about it. Using DX11 tessellation has sound technical reasoning behind it, it helps to keep the GPU memory footprint small so multiple characters can use hair and fur at the same time.
 
I believe it is a resource issue. NVIDIA spent a lot of artist and engineering resources to help make Witcher 3 better. I would assume that AMD could have done the same thing because our agreements with developers don’t prevent them from working with other IHVs. (See also, Project Cars)
 
I think gamers want better hair, better fur, better lighting, better shadows and better effects in their games. GameWorks gives them that.”

What we want to throw out there is that GPU parity is a silly concept, in much the same way console parity is.

Competition between AMD and NVIDIA forces evolution of their hardware, competitive pricing and a better situation for consumers. Forcing them to equalise allows them to work in cahoots with one another, or in the absence of more sinister activities, never encourages either company to attract the consumer more than the other.

And here’s the thing, CD Projekt RED are completely within their right to take advantage of the best technology available to them, and that just happens to be NVIDIA.

A slightly inferior visual experience is massive improvement over the exclusive rights shenanigans that occurs on console.

Granted, CD Projekt RED should probably invest a little more time in a capable alternative, but it’s also as much up to AMD as it is CD Projekt RED to optimise games.

Source: CD Projekt RED