If you are a PC gamer, then there’s almost a 99% chance that you are somewhat familiar with NVidia technology or their products. The hardware giant is one of the most popular manufacturers of high-end graphics cards, and more recently portable consoles, with the release of the Android-based NVidia Shield. A direct competitor with AMD, NVidia has also provided PC games with some of the best physics-emulation, and real-world lighting in recent history.
While physics-emulation, particle effects and active lighting may not have been a prevalent feature for video games on past consoles, those features have been showing up more over the past few years, and especially so for Xbox One and PS4 titles. NVidia has been one of the pioneers of this sort of technology; PhysX, HBAO+ and TXAA push the presentation of PC games much farther, as shown in Hawken, Borderlands 2, and more recently Watch Dogs. A new press release shows that NVidia will be once again working with Ubisoft on the PC versions of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4. As seen in Watch Dogs- for the select few who can run it at its highest settings- Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 will use Nivida GameWorks, which includes TXAA anti-aliasing and “flicker” correction, HBAO+ for lighting, Direct X11 tessellation, and NVidia PhysX simulation.
While the NVidia GameWorks suite of applicable technologies has proven to enhance the visual experience of PC games, NVidia and Ubisoft have been under fire from PC gamers with AMD video cards. Several AMD users are reporting performance issues when running Watch Dogs on a PC equipped with AMD cards from various manufacturers. Hardware manufacturing competitor AMD has stated that GameWorks directly hinders “performance on AMD products to widen the margin in favor of NVidia products”.