Rumor: Nvidia Pressured Ubisoft Into Removing DX10.1 from Assassin's Creed
Posted by Chris on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:13 pm under Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Games, Hardware, Ubisoft
The Nvidia-branded Assassin’s Creed has had some trouble running its DX10.1 features on Nvidia cards, while ATI cards seemed to manage the effects just fine. Ubisoft has released a statement saying they’ll be releasing a patch which will remove support for DX10.1 until they “rework its implementation.”
ATI’s Developer Relations team, however, made a statement when the game was introduced: “Ubisoft [is] at the forefront of technology adoption, as showcased with the fantastic Assassin’s Creed title. In this instance our developer relations team worked directly with the developer and found an area of code that could be executed more optimally under DX10.1 operation, thus benefiting the ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series.”
Naturally, rumors have begun springing up that Nvidia had threatened Ubisoft into removing support of DX 10.1. TG Daily has been investigating, with an anonymous DX 10.0 game developer close to Ubisoft telling them, “Felt you might want to hear this out. Read the explanation and laughed hard … the way how DX10.1 works is to remove excessive passes and kill overhead that happened there. That overhead wasn’t supposed to happen - we all know that DX10.0 screwed AA in the process, and that 10.1 would solve that [issue]. Yet, even with DX10.0, our stuff runs faster on GeForce than on Radeon, but SP1 resolves scaling issues on [Radeon HD 3800] X2.”
Even with other evidence of various things, TG Daily leaves it up to you, the reader, to make a decision as to what really is behind all of this. But it’s clear that the gamers are the ones losing out, as you’re either getting a game that doesn’t function properly (Nvidia owners) or losing functionality because the developer couldn’t iron things out during the development cycle (ATI/AMD owners).
via Evil Avatar
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May 9th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I own an nvidia card, and my god they suck. Their drivers was once really really awesome, but these days they lack a ton of features. There's also 1 year old issues that nvidia doesn't care about at all, they only seem to care about making Crysis run better… Horrible company.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:17 am
i myself am using a GF7600GT in my system as its about the only thing decent at a resonable price and i needed something to replace my tired old geforce FX5200
now i like my 7600 but i do agree with bounce to an extent as i know some of nvidia's cards are complete crap
for instance the ati 9200SE is to an extent the direct rival to the 5200
both cards have 4 pixel pipelines and 250mhz core clock, both the ones i had were 128 meg cards
although FX is dx9 "apparently" and the ati was dx8.1 the ati dominated it in every aspect
now get this i had the ati in a p3 550 for testing reasons and it still out scored the FX in aquamark, even though i was running the FX in my 1.3ghz celleon
May 10th, 2008 at 3:03 am
it seems, from my experience, nvidias 9 series is AT LEAST, as good as ATIs 3 series, they are the same generation so…the question is..does nvidias 9 series have the same problems with dx10? i doubt it, but have no idea, this article is kinda vague as far as which models have the problems
May 11th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Nvidida have allways been more interested in releasing speedy cards reather than quality.
i used to be a big nvidia fan after they bought over 3dfx, but once i went the ATI root i never looked back, ATI is far better than nvidia will ever be, not to mention they cost alot less and are allways feature packed.