Slightly Mad Studios responds to AMD accusations

Project Cars is not an Nvidia game

Slightly Mad Studios, a developer behind the recently released Project Cars game has finally responded to AMD accusations that Project Cars is practically an Nvidia game and that developer has sabotaged the performance on AMD Radeon graphics cards.

The accusations started at Reddit where user with Radeon R9 290X was getting pretty much the same performance as those with Nvidia Geforce GTX 760, despite an obvious performance difference between the graphics cards and that blame goes on developer and its implementation of PhysX which simply does not work on AMD graphics cards.

According to Slightly Mad Studios, this is not the case and that Project Cars was developed without favoring either Nvidia or AMD graphics cards and that they have a good relationship with both companies.

“For the past few days, erroneous information posted on Reddit and other websites has spread misinformation with regards to Project Cars’ performance on systems using AMD GPUs”, said Slightly Mad Studios in their statement. To make things a bit more clear, Slightly Mad Studios have published a list of details regarding PhysX in the game and some statements regarding their relationship with AMD and Nvidia.

Citation :
Nvidia are not “sponsors” of the project. The company has not received, and would not expect, financial assistance from third-party hardware companies.

The Madness engine runs PhysX at only 50Hz and not at 600Hz as mentioned in several articles

The Madness engine uses PhysX for collision detection and dynamic objects, which is a small part of the overall physics systems

The Madness engine does not use PhysX for the SETA tyre model or for the chassis constraint solver (our two most expensive physics sub-systems)

The Madness engine does not use PhysX for the AI systems or for raycasting, we use a bespoke optimized solution for those

The physics systems run completely independently of the rendering and main game threads and utilizes 2 cores at 600Hz

The physics threading does not interact with the rendering, it is a push system sending updated positional information to the render bridge at 600Hz

Any performance difference with PhysX would not be reflected with differences in comparing rendering frame rates. There is no interaction between PhysX and the rendering

Overall, PhysX uses less than 10% of all physics thread CPU on PC. It is a very small part of the physics system so would not make a visual difference if run on the CPU or GPU

Direct involvement with both Nvidia and AMD has been fruitful in assisting with the game performance at various stages of development. Both AMD and nVidia have had access to working builds of the game throughout development, and they have both tested builds and reported their results and offered suggestions for performance improvements.

Testing of the game with different driver versions has produced a variety of performance results on both Nvidia and AMD hardware. This is entirely to be expected as driver changes cannot always be tested on every game and every card, and this is the reason why both companies produce game-specific driver profiles, to ensure that they can get the best out of the game.

Project Cars does not use Nvidia specific particle technology–the system we use is a modified version of the same technology we used on the Need for Speed: Shift and Shift Unleashed games, and was entirely developed in-house. The reason the performance drops when there are a lot of particles on screen is simply because processing a large number of particles is very expensive.


To make things worse, a separate thread originally posted on a private Slightly Mad Studios forum, spotted by HardForum, studio boss Ian Bell categorically denied that Nvidia had paid anything toward the development of the game, and indicated that the problem with performance on AMD cards is "mainly a driver issue."

It appears that AMD is in quite a lot of trouble as two big games, Project Cars and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are not working well on AMD Radeon graphics cards and AMD definitely has to step up their game when it comes to driver releases as it did not issue a WHQL-certified driver for almost six months.



Source: Via PCGamer.com.


News by Luca Rocchi and Marc Büchel - German Translation by Paul Görnhardt - Italian Translation by Francesco Daghini


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