AMD Announces Long Term Strategic Relationship with Bethesda

[btarunr]

Building on the success made with Doom's implementation of Vulkan, and the overall through-the-roof performance levels for that title considering its graphical quality, AMD today announced a long term strategic partnership with Bethesda, a major game publisher ("The Elder Scrolls" series, "Doom," and "Dishonored," etc.) This, according to AMD's Raja Koduri, will see Bethesda optimize its entire library of games (at least the recent ones), for AMD Ryzen 8-core processors, and the upcoming Radeon "Vega" GPU architecture. The first product of this new partnership will be the 2017 release of "Prey," the hotly anticipated survival-horror game.



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[Solidstate89]

Whether you end up using a Ryzen CPU or not, this is still huge news. Bethesda's open world games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls in particular could really benefit from parallelizing more of the game. There's really no way Bethesda can only optimize for Ryzen 8-core CPUs without at least some benefit coming to 6+ core Intel CPUs as well.

This is pretty huge actually.

 

[the54thvoid]

As someone looking to almost certainly buy a 1800X, if Nvidia announced this, there'd be a f*cking furore. AMD effectively locking down Bethesda games? C'mon, is this not a double standard. Or does fanbase determinism make objectivity obsolete?

 

[vandrel]

As someone looking to almost certainly buy a 1800X, if Nvidia announced this, there'd be a f*cking furore. AMD effectively locking down Bethesda games? C'mon, is this not a double standard. Or does fanbase determinism make objectivity obsolete?

Uh, there's no "locking down" any games in this. It's just like all those games that you see the Nvidia logo on when you start it up telling you the game was optimized for their cards.

 

[kruk]

As someone looking to almost certainly buy a 1800X, if Nvidia announced this, there'd be a f*cking furore. AMD effectively locking down Bethesda games? C'mon, is this not a double standard. Or does fanbase determinism make objectivity obsolete?

If they optimize for both GPU vendors or the games don't run worse on competitors GPUs I see no problem if nVidia announces anything similar.

 

[Imsochobo]

If they optimize for both GPU vendors or the games don't run worse on competitors GPUs I see no problem if nVidia announces anything similar.

If Nvidia didn't do Physx, Cuda and Gsync I'd be a lot happier with Nvidia.

 

[ShurikN]

This could very well be an all around adoption of Vulkan idTech engine.

 

[the54thvoid]

If they optimize for both GPU vendors or the games don't run worse on competitors GPUs I see no problem if nVidia announces anything similar.

I suppose it depends on the definition of optimise. I read it as optimise (to the exclusion) of the competition but it could simply mean AMD ensure Bethesda code with Radeon driver paths as well as Nvidia ones.

 

[xkm1948]

Kinda sucks. I hate walled garden but apparently that is where everyone wanna be at.

 

[Blueberries]

What I'm seeing here is that Bethesda is going to have free reigns and won't have to hold back anymore, and if you're going to give that power to any developer, they picked the right one.

 

[diatribe]

Why? Software developers aligning with hardware manufacturers is ultimately a shittiy thing to do to their customers that don't have the hardware.

 

[Blueberries]

Why? Software developers aligning with hardware manufacturers is ultimately a shittiy thing to do to their customers that don't have the hardware.

People without the hardware will still have Normal or High modes, this fills the niche for enthusiasts with underutilized hardware. This might allow Bethesda to add another tier of physics or queue density that isn't achievable with normal hardware or a console without backlash.

 

[kn00tcn]

anyone remember the strained relationship with amd & bethesda? the nightmare that was 2011 (rage+skyrim) launches? the story that an ati beta tester leaked doom3 or something id that caused ati to be blacklisted from prerelease?

As someone looking to almost certainly buy a 1800X, if Nvidia announced this, there'd be a f*cking furore. AMD effectively locking down Bethesda games? C'mon, is this not a double standard. Or does fanbase determinism make objectivity obsolete?

why are you purposely ignoring how nv has actual proprietary features, while amd 'doesnt', & that nv consistently has caused features to be disabled from competitors even though they work (batman when spoofing the vendor)

vulkan has standards, nv probably has to do the same, why should devs be in the dark to guess how to optimize per arch when it's low level?

This could very well be an all around adoption of Vulkan idTech engine.

bethesda has said that they wont allow id to be used externally anymore, so it's the same situation as ea with frostbite

People without the hardware will still have Normal or High modes, this fills the niche for enthusiasts with underutilized hardware. This might allow Bethesda to add another tier of physics or queue density that isn't achievable with normal hardware or a console without backlash.

why wouldnt that be achievable on nv? why are people assuming so much from this news? amd has 'strategic relationships' with other devs & you dont see problems there, only with nv when they have closed source or vendor locked features (although it's not like hairworks has no problems on nv either)

 

[TheGuruStud]

If they optimize for both GPU vendors or the games don't run worse on competitors GPUs I see no problem if nVidia announces anything similar.

Nvidia has never allowed that in the history of paying off devs LOL. In fact, we know Nvidia takes over "optimization" and has tanked performance on both GPUs just to hurt AMD's framerate more. I do not recall such cheating from AMD.

 

[Prima.Vera]

If they push VULKAN as the main API also, I'm all in with it.

 

[kn00tcn]

Nvidia has never allowed that in the history of paying off devs LOL. In fact, we know Nvidia takes over "optimization" and has tanked performance on both GPUs just to hurt AMD's framerate more. I do not recall such cheating from AMD.

i'm not going to blindly bring down nv either, even though they get nasty, it's NOT ALWAYS

just cause 2 got dx10, ran great on 4870x2, it's TWIWMTBP, the only thing they locked out was the water waves effect, but otherwise it was an optimized pc version

one of the recent dirt games, maybe amd sponsored, runs better on nv or recent nv, same happened to battlefield

 

[kanecvr]

Whether you end up using a Ryzen CPU or not, this is still huge news. Bethesda's open world games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls in particular could really benefit from parallelizing more of the game. There's really no way Bethesda can only optimize for Ryzen 8-core CPUs without at least some benefit coming to 6+ core Intel CPUs as well.

This is pretty huge actually.

I hope your right and that's what they mean by this, but if the optimizations are exclusive to the Ryzen architecture, that's not cool. It's like intel was doing back in the day with loads of games, and what nvidia is doing with that gameworks bullshit. Brand specific optimizations are never good for us end-users. (AMD fan btw).

 

[ShurikN]

bethesda has said that they wont allow id to be used externally anymore, so it's the same situation as ea with frostbite

I was thinking more in line of "other Bethesda games using id engine with Vulkan", not just Doom.

 

[kn00tcn]

I was thinking more in line of "other Bethesda games using id engine with Vulkan", not just Doom.

that's exactly what i said

frostbite started getting used in non-dice games, bethesda said it's a strategic asset that they want to use, not doom or id specific

 

[Patriot]

i'm not going to blindly bring down nv either, even though they get nasty, it's NOT ALWAYS

just cause 2 got dx10, ran great on 4870x2, it's TWIWMTBP, the only thing they locked out was the water waves effect, but otherwise it was an optimized pc version

one of the recent dirt games, maybe amd sponsored, runs better on nv or recent nv, same happened to battlefield

They blocked 10.1 because nvidia cards didn't support it and it gave a performance boost to AMD.... same for the assasins creed of that era... as in... it was going to be in the game, and they removed it.

 

[cyneater]

Could be worse could be EA...

Then again Bethesda are not much better ... At least they dont rune good IP's .. yet...
But they don't really allow mods... Which is was the whole point of PC gamming.

 

[EntropyZ]

AMD hardware finally running better, without framedrops in later Fallout and Elder Scrolls?

DO WANT.

/rant
I absolutely hate the way hardware resources seem to be wasted when rendering, especially CPU power because it's never used to full potential in that horrible old engine with tacked on features. It's moddability and free tools are awesome and most people are very used to using the tools Bethesda Game Studios made available since Morrowind.

Skyrim SE runs better but only on newer hardware, they used DX11 just for the graphics improvements which are small. Older graphics cards especially the previous mid-range have better framerates sticking with Oldrim.
/endrant

 

[Kofoed]

Even though I use Intel this is great news. Developers working together with the hardware industry can only lead to better optimization right?
Besides, AMD's software is all opensource as far as I know, meaning Nvidia/Intel can optimize their drivers for AMD software as well. Unlike Nvidia gameworks that won't allow AMD to function well..

 

[Solidstate89]

I hope your right and that's what they mean by this, but if the optimizations are exclusive to the Ryzen architecture, that's not cool. It's like intel was doing back in the day with loads of games, and what nvidia is doing with that gameworks bullshit. Brand specific optimizations are never good for us end-users. (AMD fan btw).

Oh I imagine there might some specific calls made that are exclusive to AMD that Bethesda will code their engines in. But unless they do something as ridiculous as checking for whether you use an AMD or Intel CPU to determine how many threads the engine will use for the game - everyone will end up seeing some kind of benefit from this.

 

[medi01]

if Nvidia announced this, there'd be a f*cking furore. AMD effectively locking down Bethesda games? C'mon, is this not a double standard.

You might need to remind us AMD's "960 rivals 780" kind of game.

I don't see "obscure piece of code injected by AMD" in it either.

Expectations of how low they can go is very different between AMD and nVidia. I literally cannot imagine shit that Huang wouldn't do for profit.