AMD Senior Manager Critizies Nvidia's TWIMTBP Program

Regeneration · 01:50 AM

AMD's Ian McNaughton (Senior manager of advanced marketing) has posted the following in his blog: "AMD prides itself on supporting open standards and our goal is to advance PC gaming regardless whether people purchase our products.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares our philosophy. Nvidia has recently sampled some newly released The Way it is Meant to be Played titles, including Batman: Arkham Asylum, to press in hopes that they would use these titles to benchmark against the HD Radeon 5870 and 5850. There are some known issues with these proprietary TWIMTBP titles.

Batman: Arkham Asylum
In this game, Nvidia has an in-game option for AA, whereas, gamers using ATI Graphics Cards are required to force AA on in the Catalyst Control Center.

The advantage of in-game AA is that the engine can run AA selectively on scenes whereas Forced AA in CCC is required to use brute force to apply AA on every scene and object, requiring much more work.

Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced. This option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure rom.

To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory …

Need for Speed: Shift
In another TWIMTBP title, we submitted a list of issues that we discovered during the games’ development. These issues include inefficiencies in how the game engine worked with our hardware in addition to real bugs, etc.. We have sent this list to the developer for review. .

Unfortunately you will be unable to get a fair playing experience with our hardware until the developer releases a patch to address and fix our reported issues.

Resident Evil 5
AMD was unable to receive builds of this game early enough to get a chance to test and address any open issues. We will work with the developer to test and adjust any compatibility or performance issues that we encounter."

I'd like to reply to Ian: All of this can be easily avoided by providing better treatment to game developers (support, hardware, personal attention). The word on the street is… Nvidia is very generous with developer support – unlike AMD. That’s why so many developers stick to the TWIMTBP label… it’s just… good business. Another alternative would be an antitrust lawsuit against Nvidia.

**Posted by ObliVioN_ on October 9th, 2009, 03:43 PM**

I like the first suggestion.

If they worked with Developers to improve both the games AND THEIR DRIVERS, alot of the issues that I personally have with ATI's software side of things would be appeased.