When it comes to GPUs, there are pretty much only two players in the market at the moment – AMD and NVIDIA. Both are naturally rivals with each side trying to outdo the other. Sometimes one manages to outdo the other through exclusive deals, like last year when Assassin’s Creed Unity featured NVIDIA’s GameWorks technology, thus boosting its performance when played with an NVIDIA card.Unfortunately it is also the same technology that AMD believes sabotaged their card’s performance in CD Projeckt Red’s The Witcher 3. Speaking to ArsTechnica, AMD’s chief gaming scientist Richard Huddy basically accused NVIDIA of foul play.
“We’ve been working with CD Projeckt Red from the beginning. We’ve been giving them detailed feedback all the way through. Around two months before release, or thereabouts, the GameWorks code arrived with HairWorks, and it completely sabotaged our performance as far as we’re concerned.”
Huddy also adds, “We were running well before that. It’s wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.” That being said as ArsTechnica puts it, despite these technological advancements offered by GPU makers, it is also the choice of a developer to include the feature despite knowing that it could affect the performance of a rival company.
An alternative is that the developer could have opted to include AMD’s TressFX as well, but apparently they were told that it was too late as the game was too far in its development. In any case The Witcher 3 is a beautiful looking game and if gamers want to take advantage of all of its beauty, you will need a pretty specced out rig to do so.