[GameGPU] ARK: Survival Evolved, GameWorks

[RussianSensation]

I know you upgrade often Railven but have you stop to consider what you are getting for your money.

I mean games like my example in the OP, the graphics is basically crap but the performance demands 980Ti to run at 1080p on medium settings. I can forgive Ark if it launches with better performance, but if it turns out like Project Cars where problems were known years before launch but were never fixed.. well, gamers ought to demand better.

Your examples like FFXIV (I played that, its good, but runs great on my 7950!), Wow etc, don't need a lot of GPU grunt so unless you're at 4K its kinda wasted GPU power.

This is spot on. Many of us would order 980Ti SLI or Fury X CF if there was the next Crysis 3 or Metro LL out right now that looked drop dead gorgeous. ARK Survival looks worse than Crysis 1 at times, certainly the static vegetation is way worse. The character models and their animations are bad too. Crysis 3 runs better and looks MUCH better than Ark Survival and it's a 2013 game.

I guess some people would rather defend why upgrading was worth it rather than face the facts that GW and the general state of AAA PC gaming is in the gutters. Watch Dogs, Titanfall, AC Unity, Far Cry 4, Project CARS, DAI, so many broken and unoptimized games, it's hard to keep track.

26 fps on a 980Ti at 1080P, that's got to be the worst optimized PC game of 2015, worse than Batman AK. I see no need to buy broken AAA PC games than run < 30 fps on a $650 card that just came out when I can spend my $60 on the Uncharted PS4 collection, Forza 6, Bloodborne, Rare replay and buy an epic masterpiece like Red Dead Redemption for Xbox 360 for $5.

When Batman AK was outsourced to a studio of 12 people and Rocksteady asked almost $100 for the game + DLC, and the PS4 version looked better and run better than the PC port, you know AAA PC gaming is in a horrible state at the moment. The only way to teach these companies to improve their work is to stop buying their product, which means less and less reasons to buy GPU hardware because a lot well-optimized PC games run well on older gen cards without issues.

If ARK was $0.01, I still wouldn't buy it since it would be 1 cent that goes towards supporting these PC game development business practices of making horribly optimized, buggy PC games.

 

[railven]

No one said it was required to wait 6-8 months to buy an HD7970. You are just making stuff up. After-market 7970 with 1Ghz clocks dropped very shortly. Even HD7970Ghz the follow-up launched in June 21st.

Shortly, really? Launch 7970 you only had XFX DD which didn't get glowing reviews, that was Jan 2012, next custom card was when? Since you seem to know all this info, I'll let you tell us.

You bought 7970 reference design that ran hot and loud = your fault

But I never complained about it. You did, non-stop. About the price, the small performance gain, how terrible it was. You complained non-stop. Then it became a paragon of your foundation to what people should be buying. Haha, it's comical how you swap on sides and go full throttle.

You didn't wait for NV's response while everyone knew that NV would release cards very shortly based on all the rumours coming out that time = your fault

Why would I wait for NV's response if I wanted a new video card in January 2012? I was suppose to wait until March? Is that the logic you tell people? Because then in another argument you told someone "why did you buy GTX 680 when HD 7970 Ghz with 4 games @ $400 was right around the corner!"

Haha.

You ended up getting a card that had poor drivers, awful heatsink, poor overclocking and sounded like a jet engine. Whose fault is that? Many people didn't buy the 1st thing that came out in 2012 and actually waited properly to make a decision.

Fault? Did I blame anyone? No, I never did. Just like I'm not blaming anyone I bought a GTX 780, and now a GTX 980 Ti. What is your end goal pointing out I made my decisions? Cuz, you're losing me.

I am sorry that you must love putting up with loud videocards as you bought a reference Zotac 980Ti = once again an awful videocard compared to all the best after-market 980Tis out there.

Not that you care, but you sure do love attacking people's decision:
http://www.corsair.com/en-us/hydro-series-hg10-n980-gpu-liquid-cooling-bracket

Since I wanted to go Corsair HG10 N980 bracket with my H60 cooler I needed a ref PCB 980 Ti.

Imagine to my dismay that this card is just that and it was in stock at the same time as the plain Zotac I bought. I'd have gotten for the better cooler (while I wait for the Corsair bracket to launch) and most importantly a nice back plate.

Instead I ordered one from EVGA and now have a Frankenstein card

(The EVGA SC kept going in and out of stock so fast and I couldn't snag one of them, now they seem to be plentiful. Curse my impatience!)

Funny thing is that post by me is right after your post. It's like you don't read other people's post unless they mention you in them. Haha.

Since I wanted to go Corsair HG10 N980 bracket with my H60 cooler I needed a ref PCB 980 Ti.

Imagine to my dismay that this card is just that and it was in stock at the same time as the plain Zotac I bought. I'd have gotten for the better cooler (while I wait for the Corsair bracket to launch) and most importantly a nice back plate.

Instead I ordered one from EVGA and now have a Frankenstein card

(The EVGA SC kept going in and out of stock so fast and I couldn't snag one of them, now they seem to be plentiful. Curse my impatience!)

When you bought GTX780 Lightning, you couldn't find a single after-market 290, at all?

Haha, I love this:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2376404&highlight=

Asking for some opinions. High chance I might go and pick up a new card tomorrow. Done with SLI (who ever said it is better than Crossfire, I hope you choke on your propaganda pamphlets!)

I know this isn't even a big upgrade, but if I can get rid of the headaches associated with mGPU then I'm willing to spend money.

The cards I'm looking at are:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/429293/R9290_Gaming_4G_AMD_R9_290_4GB_PCIe_x_16_30_Video_Card
vs
http://www.microcenter.com/product/...e_GTX_780_3072MB_GDDR5_PCIe_30_x16_Video_Card

As far as I can see from review sites, the R9 290 seems to be the better deal. As of now, Mantle is not something I'm concerned with, as for PhysX I can always do a Hybrid setup (have done so successfully in the past.)

My main concern is driving a 1440p monitor. SLI 660 Ti's run out of VRAM in certain applications (1.5GBs of usable VRAM on a 2GB card, really NV?).


So basically to anyone who owns a 290, have custom coolers really satisfied the noise/heat issues? That was my main concern with even looking at a Hawaii based AMD card. Thankfully the price gouging seems to have settled a bit why I'm even entertaining the thought.

I have $200 in Microcenter GC so before you start linking me to "you can get x-card cheaper here" those are my two options.

I keep leaning towards the 780, but it's a stock cooler, not sure how it will handle versus the TF cooler that comes with the MSI.

Rest of the system is in sig. Thanks for any feedback.

Hard to believe. oday the 780 gets wrecked by 290/290X cards. There seems to be some pattern in your buying choices = you almost go out of your way to buy bad cards.

Yeah, it seems I buy long before the magic point you seem to tell others to buy, which seems to be a pattern forming for you "wait for something better."

Instead of trying to call me or other members here out as some AMD fans, which is already a false premise, but not focus on how ARK is a broken game, you are instead covering up the facts that 7970 reference was a bad videocard, regardless if it came from AMD or NV. Even at $399 it wasn't worth buying unless a gamer was willing to get an after-market cooler or go water. Going reference 7970 meant giving up 10-15% of overclocking headroom performance at a quiet noise levels.

7970 was not a bad card jan/2012. If you wanted to wait the 3 months for GTX 680, that is your decision. But in 01/2012, 7970 wasn't a bad card.

And please, I don't need to say anything you guys wear it so loudly it's almost comical.

Secondly, you are completely ignoring the market dynamics for AAA PC games and generalizing that "AMD fans would rather wait" than upgrade. No, that's not how things are. It's not AMD fans would rather wait, but a lot of PC gamers would rather skip this 28nm generation and skip pre-ordering $60 broken AAA PC games because they see it largely as a waste of $ and supporting the perpetuating practices of releasing broken games. Finally, a lot of people realize this is a pure stop-gap generation.

If an PC gamer is still paying $60 for any game, they are doing it wrong. Batman AK was $53 WITH the DLC Pass. For someone who loves to find the best deals, I don't know how you missed that awesome deal at GMG.

And we're talking about an Alpha game here, not even a finished product but "its the meat of this argument why aren't you paying attention! ARGGGG"

This is how I see it now. I got money to spend. if Nvidia is gonna snag games I WANT to play (MGS5/FFXIV/WOW) well and AMD is not gonna respond, I can have best of both worlds. Which I'm okay with. Went from buying an AMD card almost every 9-12 months to buying whatever is available and best for me, if Nvidia gets my money it's only AMD faults.

Right there is why you aren't seeing the market with other PC gamers. You think upgrading $600 cards every 9-12 months is normal? I bet less than 5% gamers upgrade this way.

I said this was normal? Where? When? I only post regarding my position, always have always will. Unlike you - I won't go out of my way to tell someone they made a mistake buying something

Let's look at the GPU market objectively. June 2012, AMD launched HD7970Ghz for $499. That level of performance is roughly equal to an R9 280X. What do we have as of July 2015, more than 3 years later?

$480 GTX980 = 55% faster than 280X after 3 years
$550 Fury = 67% faster than 280X after 3 years

You do realize that since September 2009 (HD5870), GPU performance has roughly increased 33-35% and it generally doubled every 3 years?

Does it look like the market is where it should be right now? Even a reference 980Ti isn't 2X faster than a 280X on those charts but the cheapest 980Ti is $650. Can we buy a $499 card that's 2X faster than R9 280X? Nope.

Look at the market objectively? Guy, the market changed a long time ago. When was the last time you remember being on the same processing node for 3 years? But you're going to argue "back in my day" and act like it even matters? Have you looked at the CPU market? Are you over there posting "don't buy these CPUs, since 2011 we've only moved this much!" No, but you're in here jumping on as many AMD crosses as you can find. Relax, AMD doesn't need you constantly badgering people and reminding us of the evil that is NV.

So instead of focusing how nearly every card this generation besides 980Ti has failed to live up to the expectations, how AAA PC games are broken/optimized, you want to keep shouting from the roof-tops how "AMD fans would rather wait" than spending hundreds of dollars on the current state of PC gaming?

As a PC gamer, not an NV or AMD gamer, I don't mind not giving AMD or NV my money or AAA PC gamers $60 of my money + DLC money because all of them have under-delivered in the 2014-2015 era thus far. Things might change but as it currently stands, there is no way we should be paying $650-700 for a 980Ti/Fury X that's 2X faster than a $499 3-year old HD7970Ghz. The regular Fury and 980 are even bigger failures at $480-550 bracket. :sneaky:

Here we are again. For someone who comes off as money-savvy, which do you keep repeating this? Hell, I didn't even pay $20 for Witcher 3.

Look, it is great that you are on a 9-12 months GPU upgrade path, but denying the current dynamics of AAA PC gaming (developers focus most of their efforts on console versions and GW has ruined most AAA PC games), horrible price/performance of this 28nm stop-gap generation and most importantly ignoring the horrible CPU and GPU optimization in the ARK Survival Evolved isn't going to win you any points by trying to spin the entire thread that "AMD fans would rather wait than upgrade".

Enjoy your 360

 

[railven]

Woah there, a potato is never the answer my friend!

We all wish that certain market realities were different right now, but at the end of the day, I love PC hardware and PC gaming and nothing is going to change that. If value was all we cared about many of us would be console gamers. PC is still THE PREMIER experience (and with VR right around the corner this is only going to be more clear to the peasant consoles) and we just have to remember that this is a hobby not a necessity and at the end of the day we just like to play with new hardware.

I mean I love PC gaming, but the truth is that I love PC hardware even more than PC gaming which is kinda ironic since its the primary thing we do with them. We all have our vices....

Haha, nice!

I got all the consoles down stairs in my living room, but I still spend more on my PC Rig, I just get the consoles for those pesky console exclusives, which thankyfuly less and less! Hell, I got a weird taste of gaming habits but:

$50-60 for specific game on console
$8-15 for same game on PC

That's an easy win for me!

 

[IEC]

As usual, RS makes good points.

As for railven's point about FFXIV Heavensward, I am perfectly happy with my setup and I will note that some areas (like heavily populated cities with lots of people spamming spells with tons of lighting effects) will always suck performance wise (maybe at least until 14nm cards with better performance) because it's an MMORPG.

For comparison, my friend with a single 980 Ti got a little over a 12000 score on the benchmark at Maximum settings while I got a 9080 score on a single 290. So you will not dip as much in places like Ishgard's Jeweled Crozier marketplace, but you'll still notice it. Of course the performance hit for enabling HBAO+ and a few other nV-optimized settings will be a little worse on my setup, but it's not a deal breaker.

 

[railven]

As usual, RS makes good points.

As for railven's point about FFXIV Heavensward, I am perfectly happy with my setup and I will note that some areas (like heavily populated cities with lots of people spamming spells with tons of lighting effects) will always suck performance wise (maybe at least until 14nm cards with better performance) because it's an MMORPG.

For comparison, my friend with a single 980 Ti got a little over a 12000 score on the benchmark at Maximum settings while I got a 9080 score on a single 290. So you will not dip as much in places like Ishgard's Jeweled Crozier marketplace, but you'll still notice it. Of course the performance hit for enabling HBAO+ and a few other nV-optimized settings will be a little worse on my setup, but it's not a deal breaker.

Now, here is where AMD gets shafted a lot, if you know this change in the DX11 client if someone were buying a new GPU and they said "I play a lot of FFXIV" what would you recommend to them? Say they're price limit was $500 coming from something archaic like HD 5850. They wanted to upgrade, they finally got the money, "hey what would you recommend?"

 

[AtenRa]

If you're debating someone and you feel they need to be reminded "this company isn't a charity" you probably shouldn't bother debating that person.



Well that's a tad deceptive. Sure, it comes with a performance price but at least NV is giving their users something to talk about.

I can't think of a single thing beside Mantle that I can do on an AMD GPU. TrueAudio I guess would be a second.

Im talking in general, im not debating with you. As i have said, consumers are finding something in NV cards they dont get with AMDs GPUs today. But if AMD decides they want to play the same game and start giving the same things as NV does with GW games then consumer will have something to get from the AMD GPUs as well.

 

[IEC]

Now, here is where AMD gets shafted a lot, if you know this change in the DX11 client if someone were buying a new GPU and they said "I play a lot of FFXIV" what would you recommend to them? Say they're price limit was $500 coming from something archaic like HD 5850. They wanted to upgrade, they finally got the money, "hey what would you recommend?"

Bang for the buck overall is still 290/390 IMO. Unless driving ultra high refresh or >1440p it's rare that you'll need to do any tweaking with settings.

Considering FFXIV only uses up to 3GB anyways, a GTX 970 is a good choice as well without completely busting a budget. A different friend got this card.

My other friend had a budget of $700 and wanted the absolute highest performance he could get in a single card so I told him to get a Gigabyte G1 Gaming 980 Ti. Which coming from a GTX 670 I suppose is worth it. He still complains of low FPS in cities

 

[Enigmoid]

This is spot on. Many of us would order 980Ti SLI or Fury X CF if there was the next Crysis 3 or Metro LL out right now that looked drop dead gorgeous. ARK Survival looks worse than Crysis 1 at times, certainly the static vegetation is way worse. The character models and their animations are bad too. Crysis 3 runs better and looks MUCH better than Ark Survival and it's a 2013 game.

I guess some people would rather defend why upgrading was worth it rather than face the facts that GW and the general state of AAA PC gaming is in the gutters. Watch Dogs, Titanfall, AC Unity, Far Cry 4, Project CARS, DAI, so many broken and unoptimized games, it's hard to keep track.

26 fps on a 980Ti at 1080P, that's got to be the worst optimized PC game of 2015, worse than Batman AK. I see no need to buy broken AAA PC games than run < 30 fps on a $650 card that just came out when I can spend my $60 on the Uncharted PS4 collection, Forza 6, Bloodborne, Rare replay and buy an epic masterpiece like Red Dead Redemption for Xbox 360 for $5.

No **** sherlock. It hasn't been optimized at all.

Seriously.

 

[Majcric]

@ railven

well said, well said. I agree on all your points. Something tells me you've been wanting to state this for a while.

 

[SimianR]

I wonder how many of you guys are actually playing Ark. I bought it because a bunch of my friends have been raving about how fun it is. Despite all the negativity around it being an early access title - I am having a blast with it. The game is a lot of fun. However, the game does run like crap as the benchmarks show. I'm running it on an R9 290 and an i5 4670K. I run it at ultra textures but set everything else to medium and pull around 30fps @ 1080p. I personally don't think the problems are based around gameworks though. The game has a very small dev team. One of the main devs has publically stated that he uses a Geforce 970 in his rig at home and that a few of the other devs in the office also use NVIDIA cards. The latest patch notes suggest that there is a performance increase on NVIDIA cards only of up to 30%. Every day there seems to be a new patch for the game, so they are working quickly, but I'm nervous that they seem to be focusing on improving performance mostly for NVIDIA cards. I don't really care what type of relationship they have with NVIDIA or AMD - it's bad to neglect a fairly substantial group of users who are playing your game and having a poor experience. Here's hoping that in the future the performance is improved for AMD cards.

 

[Subyman]

Just to point out that it is funny how the game IT IS only optimized for the Maxwell 2 GPUs.

SLI broken, Kepler performance broken, AMD GPU performance broken, CF broken etc etc

Nothing about that game is optimized. It runs better on maxwell right now, but thats about all you can say about it. ~60fps on a 980TI at 1080p with medium settings that look like Far Cry 1. They have a long way to go.

 

[3DVagabond]

Not directed to you personally,

First AMD raised prices, next inline is to do the same thing NV does with GameWorks games, screw the competition and its own last gen GPUs.

People doesnt care when NV does it, they will not care when AMD will.

Welcome to 2016 PC Gaming. :'(

All AMD had to do was release a separate driver build for the release of the 300 series and we had people claiming they were pulling shens. Even though they said they were releasing a unified driver in a couple of weeks.

 

[3DVagabond]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMhzzJXRe-0

this video tricked a lot of people. lol

I think we are going to need devs to take a stand for us. If they say they won't use it unless the playing field is fair, then that might work. It's what they should do since they should not differentiate between AMD and nvidia when it comes to their consumers

In the end it's about the money. The production companies are going to take nVidia's money as long as it's not going to negatively effect their overall bottom line. Game producers are not in it for the art, the industry, or anything else except their own pockets. They are a necessary evil for most Devs.

 

[railven]

@ railven

well said, well said. I agree on all your points. Something tells me you've been wanting to state this for a while.

Nah, I'm usually more lurker than poster, just lately slow days at work and sitting at a PC, so reading the forum more often than not.

I have a lot of respect for Russian, just sometimes feel he goes off the deep end defending his flavor of the month.

For a while I laughed when people were calling him an NV shill. It was even recognized in other forums. Good times, good times.

 

[3DVagabond]

As a PC gamer, not an NV or AMD gamer, I don't mind not giving AMD or NV my money or AAA PC gamers $60 of my money + DLC money because all of them have under-delivered in the 2014-2015 era thus far. Things might change but as it currently stands, there is no way we should be paying $650-700 for a 980Ti/Fury X that's 2X faster than a $499 3-year old HD7970Ghz. The regular Fury and 980 are even bigger failures at $480-550 bracket.

Russian, you know that AMD performance increases pretty dramatically after release. The 7970 passed the 680/770, Hawaii has passed the 780 ti, and Fury will pass Maxwell. It's close enough and with DX12 coming (not just the games but Win10 w/DX12) I think it'll happen pretty quickly. The only thing that will conceal it a bit is Gameworks titles that will make "overall" performance look close/better for nVidia.

You tend to just look at current raw numbers (Are you an accountant? ). Look at trends too.

 

[Silverforce11]

That's not to say benchmarking the game is irrelevant though since the game is for sale. Those that are interested in purchasing it should know how it will run, but I don't see this as a bad mark for the developer or certain GPUs. It does give us cause to keep an eye on this game to see if the cards begin to align as the game reaches launch.

Indeed because currently its unplayable at 1080p unless you have Maxwell 2 970+ on medium settings.

Instead of worrying about that, they wanna add more GameWorks effects. Exact replica of Project Cars during development. To the t. That game turn out pretty well... only for Maxwell 2 users.

This brings up the question why every single GW title so far with the exception of Witcher 3 (kudos to Projek Red), have been plagued with major problems at launch, to a point of being canceled (Batman AK). Is it a case of bad developers? Lack of optimizations in GW itself?

Is the focus to implement GW drawing away precious time/$ (all game production are limited by budget & time) from the core of the game: optimizations & polish?

 

[Headfoot]

Server latency in ARK is what really makes it unplayable

 

[greatnoob]

A lot of simple minded people here seem to think:
X uses Y.
X was a bad product.
Therefore X is bad because of Y.

Devs are at fault here. They're using Gameworks to cut corners (which exists for that purpose), i.e., less development time->months early faster launch->more $$ for less work.

Key point here is the development time. Using Gameworks WITH Nvidia's exclusive dev relations allows them to cut development time. Now ask yourself: if they're willing to go to extremes (that's what I'd call it) and let Nvidia develop parts of their game SO they can decrease development time (and launch faster or at the same time as other platforms->hype/marketing->more $$), what's there to stop them from releasing an unfinished and untested product 3-5 months before launch? Especially considering we've now moved onto online distribution platforms. The version on that disc is no longer the final version.

Borderlands 2 (or use Batman Arkham Asylum as an example instead) is a Gameworks title and that game was optimised well, so why are people so hellbent on criticising ONLY Gameworks when a game fails. The devs themselves decided to incorporate it shouldn't they be the ones at fault here. Furthermore why are these older titles not considered failures? I mean they do use Gameworks.

I can tell you from my own experience that if I wanted a product out before a certain time frame I WOULD without a doubt find ways to cut corners. If I was planning on implementing feature #50 and it was going to take a lot of time, I'd scrap it and TRY to get the main features polished instead. If library "T" can implement feature #50 for me and if it was easy to incorporate, I'd be sure to use it; I wouldn't care if it was buggy as long as it worked since I could just as well patch it up once the final product is released.

 

[Hitman928]

Devs are at fault here. They're using Gameworks to cut corners (which exists for that purpose), i.e., less development time->months early faster launch->more $$ for less work.

I think this is the crux of it, though I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as cutting corners. I think by creating Gameworks in the fashion that they did, Nvidia created another problem. This problem is mostly seen when Gameworks is used by smaller, less experienced developers.

 

[omek]

Could they use more HBAO?

 

[AtenRa]

I think this is the crux of it, though I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as cutting corners. I think by creating Gameworks in the fashion that they did, Nvidia created another problem. This problem is mostly seen when Gameworks is used by smaller, less experienced developers.

NV doesnt care as long as GTX980 (398mm2) is way faster (43% ) than GTX-780Ti (561mm2)

 

[desprado]

Im talking in general, im not debating with you. As i have said, consumers are finding something in NV cards they dont get with AMDs GPUs today. But if AMD decides they want to play the same game and start giving the same things as NV does with GW games then consumer will have something to get from the AMD GPUs as well.

AMD cannot because they do not have that kind of a market share and even if they do than those poor developers is conformed to get bankrupt on PC side because 80% of PC user will not buy that game.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

Dat "cinematic" experience brought to you by GameWorks!

LMAO ...

Hopefully the game won't be a disaster by launch cause steam's "early access" program is getting annoying ...

 

[3DVagabond]

As others have said, it's too early to expect the game to be optimized. It's probably better on Maxwell because that's what the devs are using and they are getting supplied code from nVidia. Hopefully they will put in some work on their own to better optimize their product for broader appeal. Depends on what the people paying the bills are requiring.

 

[AtenRa]

AMD cannot because they do not have that kind of a market share and even if they do than those poor developers is conformed to get bankrupt on PC side because 80% of PC user will not buy that game.

NV doesnt have 80% of the TOTAL GPU user base. They just sold 70-80% more GPUs the last 2 quarters.