14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has stepped forward during the global release of Watch Dogs and claimed that Nvidia's Gameworks improvements implemented into the game with Ubisoft actually worsen the performance of the PC title on AMD graphics cards, as it isn't allowed to see the game's code.
Ubisoft is currently rolling out Watch Dogs across the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms worldwide and, excluding some pretty serious bugs, errors, and crashes, the game is managing to impress quite a lot of different gamers worldwide.
However, on the PC platform, the title has been shown to perform much, much better on Nvidia graphics cards than on AMD ones.
This is, of course, due to the Gameworks implementation Ubisoft added to the game with the help of Nvidia's engineers, as Watch Dogs supports proprietary technologies like HBAO+ and TXAA on PCs that are equipped with Nvidia GPUs.
However, AMD has stepped forward and, through the voice of its representative, Robert Hallock, has told Forbes that Gameworks not only improves a title's performance on Nvidia products, but also worsens it on AMD graphics cards.
"Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40% of the market) to widen the margin in favor of Nvidia products," Hallock said.
"Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code—the most desirable form of optimization."
According to the AMD representative, Nvidia's proprietary standards and agreements prevent game developers like Ubisoft from even showing the code to AMD, so that the company can implement its own improvements into the Catalyst drivers or make suggestions to Ubisoft for general improvement.
"The code obfuscation makes it difficult to perform our own after-the-fact driver optimizations, as the characteristics of the game are hidden behind many layers of circuitous and non-obvious routines," Hallock added.
The representative has also emphasized that AMD's own philosophy regarding improvements is based on open source code that doesn't benefit one platform or the other, as seen with things like TressFX or FreeSync.
"Our work with game developers is founded concretely in open, sharable code, all of which we make available on our developer portal. We believe that enabling a developer with obvious and editable code that can be massaged to benefit everyone not only helps AMD hardware, but makes it possible for all gamers to benefit from our partnerships with a developer. As TressFX Hair runs equally well on AMD and NVIDIA hardware, for example, you can see this is true."
Nvidia, so far, hasn't commented on these accusations and Ubisoft is remaining silent for now in regards to the optimizations made for the PC edition of Watch Dogs.