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[JEMC]

fatslob-:O said:

JEMC said:

The problem with that is AMD's position in the market.

Right now, AMD sells because of its lower prices (when miners don't ruin everything), and the goodwill of its customers to support them because a series of circumstances. Supporting and promoting open standards is one of those circumstances, and in my opinion a big one.

Remove that part of AMD and all you have is an Nvidia wannabe that can't properly compete with them, resulting in less support from the community.

No, if AMD wants to compete with Nvidia using propietary software like GameWorks, they first need to catch up with them in terms of performance but also in terms of marketshare, because if devs have to develop two versions of their games for consoles and then make another two versions because of GameWorks and "insert AMD's sh!tware name here", the end result will be that they'll focus only on the one with the bigger marketshare, so Nvidia.

Obviosuly, that only counts for devs that care about PC gaming, because what I fear that most of them would do is don't care about neither of them, making shitty ports (as they do now). And that would make AMD's turn into propietary software useless.

Actually I'd argue their position is fine on the market, AAA games don't just sell to PC but they also sell on consoles ... (Supporting open standards doesn't seem to be getting them market share on the PC space so it's a moot point ?) 

Actually being an Nvidia wannabe is what I imagine AMD wants when taking a look at each of their bottomlines. (AMD already can't compete with Nvidia so I imagine AMD can't lose anything else from a different endeavor.) 

Well sure AMD has to catch up in terms of performance, that much is obvious but it's a 'chicken and egg' problem so they have to develop software to take advantage of propietary hardware features either way because both are arguably interdependent of each other ... (There's also no reason why devs couldn't share console optimizations with AMD GPUs on the PC side but the tools available are mediocre to do that so AMD has to backtrack a lot on the software side to be able to translate that advantage. AMD should make it their job to offer every console functionality as much as possible available through easier gfx APIs like DX11 then devs would have an easier time doing console ports through DX11 + AMD driver extensions rather than just stock DX11 API while getting performance benefits too in the end. Devs still have to make a stock DX11 port cause of other vendors but at least there's an option for perfromance improvements with this 'proprietary software' for AMD.) 

I'd say that supporting open standards isn't something that makes you gain marketshare, but prevents you from losing it. But that's up to anyone's opinion. The only move to open standards that can cause them to increase their marketshare is, imho, FreeSync. Being noticeably cheaper than its G-Sync counterparts make them an attractive purchase, that encourages the use of AMD cards.

Of course, the industry will have an open standard with HDMI 2.1 (or something like that), so we'll see how things go for AMD and Nvidia when that gets rolled into consumer products.

The console optimizations were always a thing I had doubts with when people started claiming that AMD would benefit from consoles having AMD GPUs. Consoles use their own tweaked APIs (OpenGL for PS4, DX 12 for XOne) that are optimized for the specific characteristics of the tech inside them. Hoping that devs would use that knowledge on PC, where most of them use yet another API (DX 11) and there are hundreds of different configurations, always looked a bit optimistic.

 

But in the end, all this discussion about asking AMD to make their own software is a bit mood, because AMD already made that with Mantle. Yet, the industry wasn't interested in it, only DICE and a handful more devs decided to use it properly, so AMD decided to give up and gifted it to Kronos to turn it into Vulkan.