Tessellation Wars per il 2010/2011?

[psychok9]

Dopo le vicende di Batman Arkham Asylum, sembra che ci sia un altro tassello da aggiungere alla guerra fredda tra nVidia ed AMD.

Sembra che nVidia abbia "spinto" Ubisoft a non implementare alcune ottimizzazioni nel preview benchmark di Hawk 2, che favorirebbero le prestazioni di tutte le schede, ma che permetterebbero una mole di calcoli tessellation inferiore, a parità di qualità visiva, e quindi un influenza minore di questo parametro nel benchmark.
Probabilmente queste ottimizzazioni arriveranno nel gioco finale (quindi i rapporti potrebbero essere diversi rispetto al benchmark preview).

You guys know we shitcanned benchmarks years ago because we found those unreliable as indicators of gaming performance and GPU cross-comparisons. While we have moved on, the GPU companies have not. Yesterday we got an email from NVIDIA about a new H.A.W.X. 2 benchmark and the company encouraged us to use it on upcoming reviews. Today we got an email from AMD asking us not to use it on upcoming products.

It has come to our attention that you may have received an early build of a benchmark based on the upcoming Ubisoft title H.A.W.X. 2. I'm sure you are fully aware that the timing of this benchmark is not coincidental and is an attempt by our competitor to negatively influence your reviews of the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series products. We suggest you do not use this benchmark at present as it has known issues with its implementation of DirectX® 11 tessellation and does not serve as a useful indicator of performance for the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series. A quick comparison of the performance data in H.A.W.X. 2, with tessellation on, and that of other games/benchmarks will demonstrate how unrepresentative H.A.W.X. 2 performance is of real world performance.

AMD has demonstrated to Ubisoft tessellation performance improvements that benefit all GPUs, but the developer has chosen not to implement them in the preview benchmark. For that reason, we are working on a driver-based solution in time for the final release of the game that improves performance without sacrificing image quality. In the meantime we recommend you hold off using the benchmark as it will not provide a useful measure of performance relative to other DirectX® 11 games using tessellation.

That last paragraph is fairly damning in my opinion and it raises some big questions. Is Ubisoft in NVIDIA's pocket and pushing technology while ignoring the company with the largest DX11 market share? Is NVIDIA pushing a benchmark of a yet-to-be released game that is somewhat broken on its competitors cards? We know NVIDIA's current GPU has more Tessellation power than AMD's latest, but we have yet to see it make a difference in anything besides a benchmark. I think this shows NVIDIA grasping at straws and I don't think it has anything up its sleeve that AMD does not already have as well; like refinements in TSMC's 40nm process.
fonte: http://www.hardocp.com/news/2010/10/20/benchmark_wars

Mi piacerebbe conoscere il parere di yossarian e conoscitori dell'argomento