The Nvidia vs AMD war that is at par with the console wars and has recently been shifting towards the Nvidia side. Why is that you ask?
Gameworks!!! Hairworks!!! HBAO!!!
And what not. Nvidia is taking on most of the games like AC Syndicate, MGSV and Witcher 3 and stuffing them with the drug called Gameworks (Which practically makes them high). Now let us consider a scenario:
Friend1: Hey man! Look AC Syndicate is coming out with Nvidia gameworks!
Friend2: Yeah I know. But it requires a very good graphics card. I don’t have that kind of budget now.
Friend1: Yeah that’s the problem with me too.
The aforementioned conversation happens in 60-70% of the gamers. Now suppose one of them goes out of the way to get a good GPU:
Friend1: Hey man! I convinced my parents to get me a GTX 980 and I have it at my home now!! Come let’s play AC.
Friend2: (Has played the game on a mid-high ranged PC): *Smiling* Yeah let’s go. *After seeing the game* Hmm. The graphics don’t seem that different.
We guess the expression trolled will be an understatement here.
Well for those who have the eyes of Sherlock Holmes, such details will never miss the eye. But to the average person, it’ll all be the same. Gameworks which include HBAO, Global Illumination etc are not visible to the naked eye unless someone slides the in-game settings from low to high or ultra. Even looking at screenshots of various setting presets, it is difficult to point out differences between high and ultra. So why the hassle? When we played The Witcher 3, we had a hard time pondering over whether we should turn on Hairworks or not, because it didn’t make much of a difference. Rather we preferred that it was switched off due to the unnecessary 30% fps drop (And Geralt looked weird). And it was not Nvidia who released Hairworks in a game first, it was AMD who had done it with the reboot of Tomb Raider.
Recently Nvidia has started releasing posts on the various graphical tech they are infusing in games, and we happened to come across the AC Syndicate post. To not much of our surprise, there wasn’t much difference in the graphics along High and Ultra. Specific screenshots obviously will indicate otherwise, but during gameplay, such a small difference is practically invisible. We also had hands on with the PS4 version of AC Syndicate, and though the PC version is visibly better than the console versions, the various in game presets do not make much of a difference unless you’re playing at a resolution below 1080p.
Gameworks is one of the big reasons games like Arkham Knight, AC Unity and Watch Dogs were such a broken port. Most of these implementations were incompatible with the AMD cards and even on Nvidia cards didn’t perform consistently. One fun fact we would like to add over here is that except for Witcher 3 and Meal Gear (That too, after all the patches), every game that has implemented Gameworks has been filled with bugs.
So the main question here:
Is Gameworks really any good?
For average people Gameworks is practically useless. We also prefer keeping it off and maximizing the texture and foliage distance of a game. This is simply because Gameworks hits the performance of the game very hard and we would rather go for performance over small changes in graphics. Even cards like the GTX 970 are not able to handle Gameworks with everything cranked up to high or ultra. Games look good even without Gameworks. Gameworks is just like a brand name of Nvidia and is not as good as they claim it to be.
Let us know what you think about Gameworks in the comments below and if you’d want to Nvidia to keep implementing Gameworks in games.