AMD acusa a nVidia de jogo sujo com o GameWorks

[Enzo]

Opensources sempre foram boas ideias. Parece que os trabalhos feitos desta forma correm sempre mais rápido e melhor, existem mais ideias a fluir para um mesmo proposito.

[LPC]

Opensources sempre foram boas ideias. Parece que os trabalhos feitos desta forma correm sempre mais rápido e melhor, existem mais ideias a fluir para um mesmo proposito.

Boas!
Apenas não sei se isso chega para contrabalançar os €€€ que a Nvidia dá ás equipas dos jogos para integrarem o Gameworks...

Cumprimentos,

LPC

[Jorge-Vieira]

Exclusive – What’s Next For Nvidia’s GameWorks? How It All Started And Where It’s Going

As a graphics company first and foremost Nvidia has made it a goal to be at the forefront of pushing visual computing technology in every avenue where it’s deemed feasible. The GameWorks program is a prime example of the company’s extensive hands-on approach to push graphics technology to its limits in arguably the purest, most engaging and most challenging media of all, video games.
The Witcher 3

Games have been long regarded as works of art. They’re creations sculpted in the eyes of their creators to make their dreams a living breathing reality. Game worlds are truly that, worlds. They’re complex and intricate constructions that exist not only to serve the purpose of achieving the desired gameplay design but more importantly to tell a story. And what better way to tell a story than to visualize it. The process by which an idea evolves to something that you can interact with using your most stimulating sense of all, sight.
And it’s this process of creation, of transforming a concept into something tangible that we can interact with using our senses is what truly defines creativity. The more ambitious the project the more challenging it becomes for creators to make their ideas a reality as they’ve envisioned them. This is where a program like GameWorks can help bright minds in the game development world make their games look the way they’ve always thought they should look and put them on our screens.
Nvidia GameWorks : How It All Started And Where It’s Going

Today you’re in for a treat. I’ve been engaged with the folks over at Nvidia, who have kindly humored me for several weeks in my attempt to tell the GameWorks story in all of this. How it started, what it’s doing and where it’s going. So buckle up, because this is going to be a fun ride.

Let’s begin by explaining what GameWorks actually is and why it exists. GameWorks is a developer program that was established by Nvidia in late 2013. Its goal is to provide developers with a collection of tools and graphics libraries for a variety of ends. Be it to help them improve the visual quality of their games, develop software for Virtual Reality solutions or even mobile platforms powered by Nvidia hardware.
A great number of technologies fall under GameWorks and they include software development kits, game physics engines and a library called VisualFX. This library encompasses a number of Nvidia optimized rendering techniques and in-game visual effects that span everything from shadows to anti-aliasing, depth of field, global illumination, hair and fire simulation, ambient occlusion, lighting, and other effects.
Below you will find the Physics and VisualFX solutions as listed on Nvidia’s website.
VisualFX

Provides solutions for rendering and effects including:

• HBAO+ Enhanced Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion
• TXAA Temporal Anti-aliasing
• Soft Shadows Improves on PCSS to reach new levels of quality and performance, with the ability to render cascaded shadow maps
• Depth of Field Combination of diffusion based DOF and a fixed cost constant size bokeh effect
• FaceWorks Library for implementing high-quality skin and eye shading
• WaveWorks Cinematic-quality ocean simulation for interactive applications
• HairWorks Enabling simulation and rendering of fur, hair and anything with fibers
• GI Works Adding Global Illumination greatly improves the realism of the rendered image
• Turbulence High definition smoke and fog with physical interaction as well as supernatural effects
• FLEX: https://developer.nvidia.com/flex

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Physics

Rigid bodies, cloth, destruction, particles and fluids:

• PhysX Scalable multi-platform game physics solution supporting a wide range of devices, from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs
• Clothing Quickly generate dynamic clothing. Artist focused with intuitive and easy authoring tools
• Destruction Enables artists to quickly generate pervasive destruction significantly enhancing the gaming experience
• Particles & Fluids Particles enable artists to easily provide a much more immersive environment by using physical particles which can interact e.g. with wind and explosion force fields. Particles can also be used to simulate fluids

We wanted to learn how the program has been received since its inception and the rate of adoption thatit has seen. As such, Nvidia’s Brian Burke has kindly agreed to share some stats exclusively with us. We’re told there are over 150 thousand members enrolled in the program as you read this, which is quite remarkable and it has seen constant growth month on month. Members of the program are very global and have wildly diverse needs. The most popular downloads we’re told are Nsight, Androidworks, PhysX, Flex and HairWorks.
Interview With Nvidia’s Rev Lebaredian – The Past, Present And Future Of GameWorks

However, to really tell the story of how all of this came to be and where it’s going there’s really no better person to talk to than Rev Lebaredian, Mr GameWorks himself. Rev’s official position within Nvidia is Sr. Director, GameWorks and he has headed the program since its inception. Rev kindly agreed to chat on the phone a few weeks back and talk about how the program started, the challenges the team faced, where he hopes to take the program in the DirectX 12 era and what has been his proudest achievements.
Khalid Moammer – Editor, Hardware at WCCFTech.com
Please walk our readers through how GameWorks grew from an idea to a vision and ultimately to this large initiative with over 300 engineers, highlighting any important evolutionary milestones along the way since the program’s inception two years ago.
Rev Lebaredian – Sr. Director, GameWorks
“GameWorks as a name was introduced two years ago, but the team and the dedication to pushing the envelope have been in place for many years. For over a decade, we’ve been working closely with game developers to enhance and optimize their games, maximizing the full potential of our GPUs.
The creative engineers that worked with our partners developed new graphical techniques, wrote SIGGRAPH papers, published GeForce SDK Samples and example code, and produced some really incredible tech demos to push the leading edge of computer graphics. These efforts proved to be necessary, but not quite sufficient. One lesson we learned is that until we proof-test a new tech in a real game engine and ship it in a game, the job isn’t done. That’s why the GameWorks developer program emphasizes putting each tech to work in a game before it is fully released, to sort through the complex issues arising from real-world applications. Ultimately, we are passionate about pushing the limits of the gaming experience, and are committed to helping developers get to the future faster.”
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Rev explained that for long developers have had no incentive to use all of the new features that the latest hardawre has been bringing to the table. That’s because all the work and effort spent on these new technologies would only benefit a very small minority of the market that has adopted this new hardware. This meant that visuals were always several years behind and that’s why initiatives like GameWorks are very important to keep pushing the envelope.
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Khalid Moammer – Editor, Hardware at WCCFTech.com
How have you managed to cater to the broad spectrum of developers that range from the really experienced and adventurous who like to know every little detail about the tech and tweak it and others who just want things to work and don’t necessarily share the same level of interest in the nitty and gritty of things?
Rev Lebaredian – Sr. Director, GameWorks
“Our GameWorks program has evolved the past few years, as we figure out how to work best with different types of game developers. Some game developers are passionate about their own engines, and customizing how our technology is integrated with theirs; while others prefer to use existing 3^rd party game engines (e.g. UE4, Unity), with our technology readily integrated for them. We’ve been working to please both types of developers as we integrate our technologies into popular engines, as well as modifying our APIs and source access to please the hardcore developers.”
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Rev made it a point to underline how developers. just like ordinary people, are a wildly diverse group with varying needs and goals. Hence their level of engagement in the program is naturally different and very much dependent on what they’re looking to achieve. Some are just happy to have the technology integrated and working while others love to learn about the technology, tinker and improve upon it
Rev went on to say that it’s really important to have a mechanism by which developers are able to do just that but in a away that doesn’t let code branch. So whatever improvements are made can then be passed on to all other developers. This also ensures that updates can be made on a continual basis without issue. Rev noted that this is a challenging area where it’s been a constant learning process for the team to work on and refine this mechanism.
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Khalid Moammer – Editor, Hardware at WCCFTech.com
DirectX 12 is coming next year bringing with it a few new features such as conservative raster and tiled resources. Have you run into any challenges or problems that you believe DirectX 12 or the new features can help you overcome in terms of realizing a visual effect or a performance target that was quite challenging under DX11?
Rev Lebaredian – Sr. Director, GameWorks
“We support all APIs that game developers care about. Currently, DX11 is still the most widely used API, so we continue to support it and provide efficient solutions within this API. That being said, as DX12 gains more adoption, we will release DX12 compatible versions of GameWorks modules, as we see demand for them.
Currently, we haven’t seen any cases where DX11 is limiting us in regards to GameWorks technologies, particularly the physically based ones.”
Khalid Moammer – Editor, Hardware at WCCFTech.com
What areas of the program or achievements are you proud of the most and which areas do you believe deserve more attention, development and general improvement? And can you give us some examples of game developers’ involvement in this process of improvement? Be it through feedback or other means.
Rev Lebaredian – Sr. Director, GameWorks
“Personally, I’m most proud of the adoption of our technology in top titles in the past few years. Most recently, we worked with Bethesda on the Volumetric Lighting feature in Fallout 4; the hair and fur in Witcher 3 was a big hit as well.
If it wasn’t for our hard work and cooperation with these game developers, some of the effects we can enjoy now would probably not be in any games for years to come.
We are continually looking to improve all of technologies through direct feedback from game developers, and from feedback from our own team of engineers and technical artists who work directly on title engagements. As our libraries, tools, and engine integrations mature, we’re seeing quicker adoption of our technology.
Let’s take a look at our PhysX SDK as an example. Since the first version shipped in 2005, thousands of developers have used PhysX in hundreds of games and demos, in several game engines, as well as for applications like education and industrial simulation. The PhysX ecosystem spans desktop, mobile, console and cloud platforms. Over the years we have received tons of feedback from our developer partners, particularly Epic, Unity, Natural Motion and Autodesk, among many others. Whenever practical, we collaborate directly with developers to implement new features, and we have often adopted changes suggested by customers. We co-developed our first PS3 ports with Sony. In 2015 we opened up source access through GitHUB.
Also, it’s always great to see how enthusiast gamers and the hobbyist communities make use of the tech we publish. There are many examples on Youtube, particularly from the Unreal Engine 4 crowd. Have a look at this video produced by Byzantos using VXGI , it’s a beautiful example.”




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Bringing this to a close it’s important to look back at 2015 and realize how significant it’s been for GameWorks. Last year has seen the highest level of adoption of Nvidia GameWorks technologies to date by our account. Not only have we seen more more major titles come out with GameWorks features than ever, but we’ve also seen some GW technologies make it into games for the very first time such as WaveWorks in Just Cause 3 and War Thunder.
We’re already two weeks into 2016 and while the Nvidia folks told us that they weren’t ready to announce anything new just yet, they did hint at some exciting things to come this year for GameWorks and DirectX 12. Which makes a year that’s already shaping up to be one of the most exciting for gamers and enthusiasts even better.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/exclusive-nvidias-gameworks-started/#ixzz3xJyzgMv4

[Jorge-Vieira]

Nvidia GameWorks HBAO+ Behind Visual Corruption In Gears Of War Ultimate Edition

Earlier this week Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was exclusively released on the Windows 10 Store as the world’s first DirectX 12 game. An event that was supposed to represent Microsoft’s commitment to PC gaming and a community that has been growing inpatient for many years with a company that it believes has effectively abandoned it in favor of chasing the elusive “living room” market.
__________________________________________________ _________________________________________
[UPDATED 03/05/2016 03:35 PM] We’ve just learned that no one at AMD was informed by Microsoft that review codes were being handed out to journalists for performance testing earlier this week and only found out after the fact.
We have also tested the game again with the newly released patch. This patch was intended to fix the visual corruption issue with ambient occlusion turned on. However, it appears that all this patch does to address the issue is forcibly disable Ambient Occlusion, even if enabled through the menu.
Gears of War : Ultimate Edition post-patch – Ambient Occlusion On – R9 Nano

Gears of War Ultimate Edition post-patch / Ambient Occlusion On

Gears of War : Ultimate Edition post-patch – Ambient Occlusion Off – R9 Nano

Gears of War Ultimate Edition post-patch / Ambient Occlusion Off

Photo showing Gears of War : Ultimate visual corruption – Taken by our Hardware Editor Keith May
__________________________________________________ _________________________________________
Sadly what we ended up with was a broken mess and “one of the most disastrous PC game launches in years” writes Forbes’s Jason Evangelho. We covered the many foibles of this, there’s no other word for it, broken game earlier in the week. We would highly advise you to go check out that article if you haven’t already as we’re not going to cover all of the game’s issue here. Rather we will focus on the elephant in the room. Something that’s been so often cited as the culprit in many broken games in the past.
Controversy Always Seems To Find Nvidia’s GameWorks Program

GameWorks is a developer program that was established by Nvidia in late 2013. Its goal was to provide developers with a collection of tools and graphics libraries for a variety of ends. Be it to help them improve the visual quality of their games or develop software for Virtual Reality solutions and mobile platforms powered by Nvidia hardware.
We’re going to focus primarily on the PC wing of the GameWorks program, more specifically a library dubbed VisualFX. This library encompasses a number of Nvidia optimized rendering techniques and in-game visual effects that span everything from shadows to anti-aliasing, depth of field, global illumination, ambient occlusion, lighting, hair and fire simulation as well as other effects.

There’s been a lot of controversy, a lot of confusion, hearsay, misconceptions and mischaracterizations around several aspects of GameWorks since its inception. GameWorks had been a subject of debate for a long while due to various concerns over alleged obfuscation of developers’ control by Nvidia and the serious implications this has on the technical quality and performance of games involved with the program. There were also numerous accusations of GameWorks harming the gaming industry and sabotaging the performance of AMD hardware.
A number of prominent developers went as far as to describe the program at one point as a “blackbox”and called it “unusable” at the early stages of its life. All of this is what prompted us to take a deeper look into the program and investigate the numerous claims being made. However, it’s been a long while since many of those concerns had been voiced and Nvidia did react by introducing improvements and adjustments along the way to address many of the issues raised.
Suffice to say it’s been a hot topic that we attempted to address head-on by talking with both Nvidia and AMD in a four thousand word investigative report that I published last year. Earlier this year I spoke with Nvidia again and published a follow-up to underline some of the much needed improvements and changes that the company has made.
Unfortunately it seems the controversy never ends. Beginning with a string of disastrous game launches – Including the terribly buggy and poor performing Assassin’s Creed Unity And the similarly broken Batman Arkham Knight – on the PC over the past two years all of which were part of the GameWorks program to the ultimately broken Gears of War : Ultimate Edition which was released earlier this week.
Nvidia’s HBAO+ GameWorks Feature Is Behind The Visual Corruption Issue In Gears Of War Ultimate Edition




Screenshots showing Gears of War : Ultimate visual corruption – Taken by our Hardware Editor Keith May
As it turns Nvidia’s HBAO+ ambient occlusion feature was the culprit behind the horrible artifacting / visual corruption issue that plagued some of AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. What’s more eyebrow-raising is the fact that there isn’t even any mention of HBAO+ inside Gears of War Ultimate Edition’s graphics settings menu. There’s only an option to turn “Ambient Occlusion” on or off, with no mention of what type of ambient occlusion it is.

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Typically when a vendor specific visual effect is implemented in any game it ends up listed under its vendor specific designation . For example HairWorks would be listed as HairWorks and HBAO+ under HBAO+ rather than given generic “hair physics” or “ambient occlusion” designations. When no such specificity is present it’s assumed that the visual effect in question is a developer specific, hardware agnostic implementation.
In the case of Gears of War Ultimate Edition it was Nvidia’s proprietary HBAO+ GameWorks feature listed under a generic name. In fact we only learned that the ambient occlusion implementation in Gears of War : Ultimate Edition was in fact HBAO+ when Nvidia’s Andrew Burnes announced the availability of Game Ready drivers on the GeForce.com blog and named it as one of the game’s features.
Source : GeForce.com – Game Ready Driver Announcement
I can only speculate about why the decision was even made by Microsoft to give HBAO+ a generic label. It’s quite unusual and very much the opposite of what you’d want to do as a developer to ensure transparency. For contrast let’s look at what the Far Cry 4 developers decided to label the exact same ambient occlusion implementation in their game’s menu.

Far Cry 4 – visual quality settings menu

Not only is it plainly labeled as a GameWorks feature but it’s also optional. As in it’s not part of any of the game’s graphics presets. On the other hand in the case of Gears of War Ultimate Edition, HBAO+ is enabled by default if the Ultra preset is selected.

Disabling HBAO+ Will Solve The Visual Corruption Issue But That’s Only The Tip Of The Iceberg

Simply turning off ambient occlusion in the settings will completely resolve the artifacting that we witnessed while testing the AMD Radeon R9 Nano and R9 380 graphics cards.





As it turns out HBAO+ wasn’t the only thing hidden behind a veil. Whilst digging into the game’s files a friend of WCCF – youtuber Blindrun – spotted a very interesting hidden game file. The file is BaseEngine.ini and it can be found in the following folder path on Windows 10 : C:\ProgramFiles\WindowsApps\Microsoft.DeltaPC_1.6. 0.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\Engine\Config
The WindowsApps folder is windows protected. Which you means that you’ll have to jump through some hoops to actually access it. But here’s how to do it.

In BaseEngine.ini we spotted a very peculiar entry. “bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=False”. More peculiar is the fact that this file cannot be edited in anyway. If it is, the game will simply overwrite any changes once it’s booted up and connected to Microsoft’s servers.
The entry means that hardware accelerated PhysX is enabled by default in the game and because any changes to the file are overwritten automatically upon game start-up means it can’t be disabled. For those of you unaware PhysX is Nvidia’s proprietary game physics engine and can only be accelerated by Nvidia’s own graphics cards. If a competing GPU is detected by the PhysX driver, the work will instead be automatically offloaded onto the CPU. This in turn means that the feature will run disproportionately slower on non Nvidia equipped systems.
In the past, all games that included hardware accelerated PhysX features such as debris, water physics and so on included the option to turn it off. This was critical because these features directly influenced how the game performed. The option was also necessary when evaluating AMD and Nvidia graphics cards to ensure that the testing was done on an even playing field.
Additionally, because hardware accelerated PhysX features are only visual and aren’t part of the game’s core mechanics ;disabling them would not affect the game’s behavior in any way. Sadly because we are unable to turn off hardware acceleration in Gears of War Ultimate Edition we don’t know what it’s actually doing. And whether it could account for some of the performance disparity we’re seeing between Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Right now we simply don’t know what effect it has because we simply can’t test it.
Suffice to say there seem to be some “shenanigans” going on here so we’ll keep a close watch and update everyone accordingly. In the meantime we’d advise PC gamers to wait until the mist clears on the issues surrounding this troubled PC release before pulling the trigger.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks-visual-corruption-gears-war-ultimate-edition/#ixzz428CeZTr2


Espera-se mais umas guerras por causa disto...
A nVidia podia aplicar as suas tecnologias mas sem prejudicar ninguém e, já não é a primeira vez que isto acontece... quem fica prejudicado são sempre os consumidores.

[Enzo]

Ultimate visual corruption parece-me...apropriado

[MAXLD]

Já não bastava a cortina da nVidia, agora ainda tem outra da M$ à frente. E com isso cada vez se complica mais o averiguar destas tretas por parte do jornalismo, porque obviamente a M$ não quer cá ninguém a mexericar com os files. Isto tá a ficar bonito está...

[Jorge-Vieira]

Details about NVIDIA's GameWorks 3.1 Update...

Shedding a little light on Monday's announcement

Most of our readers should have some familiarity with GameWorks, which is a series of libraries and utilities that help game developers (and others) create software. While many hardware and platform vendors provide samples and frameworks, taking the brunt of the work required to solve complex problems, this is NVIDIA's branding for their suite of technologies. Their hope is that it pushes the industry forward, which in turn drives GPU sales as users see the benefits of upgrading.

This release, GameWorks SDK 3.1, contains three complete features and two “beta” ones. We will start with the first three, each of which target a portion of the lighting and shadowing problem. The last two, which we will discuss at the end, are the experimental ones and fall under the blanket of physics and visual effects.

The first technology is Volumetric Lighting, which simulates the way light scatters off dust in the atmosphere. Game developers have been approximating this effect for a long time. In fact, I remember a particular section of Resident Evil 4 where you walk down a dim hallway that has light rays spilling in from the windows. Gamecube-era graphics could only do so much, though, and certain camera positions show that the effect was just a translucent, one-sided, decorative plane. It was a cheat that was hand-placed by a clever artist.

GameWorks' Volumetric Lighting goes after the same effect, but with a much different implementation. It looks at the generated shadow maps and, using hardware tessellation, extrudes geometry from the unshadowed portions toward the light. These little bits of geometry sum, depending on how deep the volume is, which translates into the required highlight. Also, since it's hardware tessellated, it probably has a smaller impact on performance because the GPU only needs to store enough information to generate the geometry, not store (and update) the geometry data for all possible light shafts themselves -- and it needs to store those shadow maps anyway.

Even though it seemed like this effect was independent of render method, since it basically just adds geometry to the scene, I asked whether it was locked to deferred rendering methods. NVIDIA said that it should be unrelated, as I suspected, which is good for VR. Forward rendering is easier to anti-alias, which makes the uneven pixel distribution (after lens distortion) appear more smooth.
Read on to see the other four technologies, and a little announcement about source access.

The second technology is Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO). Currently, Ambient Occlusion is typically a “screen-space” effect, which means that it is applied on the rendered image buffers. It can only use the information that is available within those buffers, which is based on the camera's 2.5D projection of the world. Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion calculates ambient occlusion results upon a grid of voxels, in world space. It is not limited to camera's view of the world.

This is the current technology, which collects data from the camera's buffers.
The actual occlusion information is gathered by ray tracing from points within this voxel grid, outward in a hemisphere, to other points in the voxel grid. Axis-aligned voxels are highly efficient to ray trace, especially compared to triangles. Volume elements (vo... x el...) that are very close to other objects tend to appear darker, which is basically because indirect light bounces have fewer potential directions to come from.

VXAO uses world-space data, which properly shades the ground under the tank.
SSAO, on the other hand, has no way of knowing how deep the tank is.
In a truly realistic simulation, global illumination would be computed directly, rather than dimming your added “indirect” light term by some AO value at various points in space. That is slow, though... like, “too slow for Pixar” levels of slow. SSAO does a pretty good job considering its limitations, but VXAO takes the approximation further by accounting for the actual environment (rather than the camera's slice of it, as we've mentioned). This should be a major improvement for moving cameras, although you can definitely see the difference even in screenshots.

The buffer NVIDIA creates. Partially filled voxels visualized as blue; full as red; empty clear.
The third technology is called Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS), which increases the quality of dynamic shadows. Rather than using just shadow maps, shadows are also computed by rasterizing geometry in light-space and determining if a list of screen pixels are occluded by them. The two results, frustum traced shadows and the soft shadows that are calculated by PCSS, are interpolated between by distance from the occluding object. This gives sharp, accurate, high-quality shadows up close that smoothly blur with distance.

Some sites reported, based on Monday's original press release, that NVIDIA is ray tracing these shadows. That is incorrect. NVIDIA states that the algorithm is two-stage. First, the geometry shader constructs four planes for each primitive in the coordinate system that the light sees when it projects upon the world. Basically, imagine that the light is a camera. The pixel shader then tests every (applicable) screen pixel, converted into the light's coordinate system, to see where it is. If it overlaps with a primitive, and that primitive is closer to the light than that screen pixel is, then that screen pixel is shadowed from that light. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, this looks like an application of the Irregular Z-Buffer algorithm that NVIDIA published in a white paper last year. They have not yet responded to my inquiry about whether this is the case.

Those were the three released features. The last two are classified as experimental betas.
The first of these is NVIDIA Flow. This technology simulates combustible fluid, fire, and smoke. It does so with an adaptive voxel simulation. This version is now able to leak outside of its bounding box, and it also handles memory properly in that case. It will be added to Unreal Engine 4 in Q2 of this year, although they did not specify whether it would be available in Epic's binary version in that timeframe, or just the GitHub source.





The second technology is PhysX-GRB. This is their popular rigid-body physics simulation, which has been given a major speed boost in this (experimental) version. NVIDIA claims that it is about two- to six-fold faster when measured under heavy load. They show a huge coliseum being reduced to rubble as balls from space crash upon it, managing ~40 FPS on whatever GPU they used. NVIDIA also claims that both CPU and GPU solvers should now produce identical results. “Flipping the switch” should just be a performance consideration.

NVIDIA closed their presentation with a few announcements of GameWorks source code being released to the public. PhysX, PhysX Clothing, and PhysX Destruction are already available, and have been for quite some time. Two new technologies are being opened up at GDC as well, though. The first is their Volumetric Lighting implementation that we discussed at the top of this article, and the second is their “FaceWorks” demo, which models skin and eye shading with sub-surface scattering and eye refraction.

NVIDIA has also announced plans, albeit not at GDC, to release the source for HairWorks, HBAO+, and WaveWorks. Again, they are not ready to announce a timeline yet, but their intentions have been declared. In fact, they intend to open up “most or all technologies over time.” This is promising because, while registered developers can access source code privately, the community at large benefits when the public gains access. They say that they do not want to open up projects until they've matured, and that makes sense. Both Mozilla and The Khronos Group do the same, holding some projects to their chest until they believe they are ready for the public.
The part that counts is whether they actually are released when complete.

Noticia:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphic...orks-31-Update



ESperam-se mais batalhas com a AMD por causa destas novidades e espera-se também que isto não provoque problemas nos jogos a nível de optimizações como tem acontecido na esmagadora maioria dos jogos que utilizam o Game Works.

[Jorge-Vieira]

Nvidia Partially Open Sources GameWorks Library

One of the biggest complaints about GameWorks is the closed source nature of the toolkit. Because of this black box like nature, developers and competitors have had a hard time optimizing games and hardware for it. With the release of GameWorks 3.1 though, Nvidia will be open sourcing parts of GameWorks which will be available on GitHub.
Right now PhysX, PhysX Clothing and PhysX destruction are already available on GitHub. Of the new additions to GameWorks, Volumetric Lighting will be added at GDC while the previously FaceWorks will join it as well. In the near future, HairWorks, WaveWorks and HBAO+ will also join the open source depository.

Even with these open source additions, there still remains parts of GameWorks that will remain closed source. These are VAXO, VXGI, Turf Effects, FlameWorks and PCSS among others. This means that developers are still limited somewhat unless they agree to Nvidia’s EULA and gain some private source access.
The biggest question about GameWorks though is its implementation. Developers have been lazy in optimizing GameWorks and leaving too much at default or maxed out settings. Open sourcing might not help if developers don’t take the time to tweak things. This should help AMD though who have been on of the most vocal critics. The biggest question is how quickly the open source will track new GameWorks releases, especially given how version 3.2 has no mention of GitHub releases on the roadmap.

Noticia:
http://www.eteknix.com/nvidia-partia...works-library/


Tecnologias fechadas nunca foram boas para os consumidores, por isso espero que esta semi-abertura do código sirva para colmatar grande parte dos males que esta tecnolgia da nVidia tem nas placas da AMD.

[Jorge-Vieira]

NVIDIA Releases HairWorks, Volumetric Lightning and FaceWorks Source Code on GitHub – HBAO+ To Be Added Soon

NVIDIA has released the source code of their GameWorks feature known as HairWorks on GitHub. This is just a few days after NVIDIA added source code of other gaming technologies following their GDC 2016 presentation where the graphics company announced their latest GameWorks 3.1 SDK for developers. The new features that are now available through GitHub include HairWorks, FaceWorks and Volumetric Lightning.

NVIDIA’s HairWorks, FaceWorks and Volumetric Lightning Source Code Now Available on GitHub

The source code for all three features which are incorporated in the latest AAA titles are available to all devs to use in their gamers. As we remember, NVIDIA’s HairWorks was featured in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt which was announced as the Best RPG of 2016. The game utilized the power of NVIDIA’s powerful tessellation engine to render the hair on not only majority of in-game characters but also several monsters. The HairWorks renderer was used to simulate and render both fur and hair to provide a real life experience.
Another feature that is part of the GitHub release is Volumetric Lightning which was enabled in Fallout 4. The next chapter in Fallout Universe went on to become the Game of the Year for 2015. The game featured one of the best implementation of God Rays which were simulated on the GPU and leveraged from GPU tessellation. This feature added a lot of atmospheric depth to an already great AAA title and looked great in motion.

In 2015 we started releasing source code for GameWorks libraries on GitHUB. We continued that at GDC 2016. Our intention is to advance graphics and simulation in gaming and be helpful to those that create games. As promised at GDC, this morning source code for HairWorks was made available on GitHUB.
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the open-world fantasy role-playing game from developer CD Projekt RED, just walked away with the Game of the Year award at the 16th annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony during the 2016 Game Developers Conference. The critically acclaimed title also received the award for Best Technology for its complex game engine that combines brilliant visuals with a huge game world.
The same technology that CD Projekt used for hair rendering is available with source code for free to all developers. In addition, the same technology that was an integral part of the ambiance for the blockbuster Fallout 4 is also available with source code for all developers to use. via NVIDIA

The source code for the following GameWorks libraries is currently accessible from GitHub. Do note that you won’t be able to access the source code unless you are part of the GameWorks Access Team on GitHub. To get access to NVIDIA’s GameWorks libraries, simply visit this page to join the access team and you’ll be able to get the invitation within an hour.

• PhysX
• PhysX Clothing
• PhysX Destruction
• Volumetric lighting
• FaceWorks demo
• HairWorks

NVIDIA has also released a roadmap stating that they will be offering more updates to the Gameworks 3.1 SDK in June followed by the release of the Gameworks 3.2 SDK in September 2016. More updates and information related to Gameworks will be revealed at upcoming events so be sure to stay tuned. There is also meant to be even more source code releases on GitHub and the next major release that arrives in June 2016 will include the HBAO+ libraries which are currently in use by a majority of AAA titles.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks...#ixzz43lNzVaCe