[pcper] Interview: AMD's Richard Huddy

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sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
3,273
149
106
Lol, seriously?
He is pulling all these numbers out of his hat. I cant find any numbers from Ghost.

Alone that he is claiming that Hairworks runs only with 1/30 of the performance of TressFX on their hardware is so ridiculous.
 

3DVagabond

Lifer
Aug 10, 2009
11,951
204
106
Lol, seriously?
He is pulling all these numbers out of his hat. I cant find any numbers from Ghost.

Alone that he is claiming that Hairworks runs only with 1/30 of the performance of TressFX on their hardware is so ridiculous.

Here's the interview on MaximumPC. You can listen to it to get the exact figures, rather than just my best recollection, and the metric he's using.

I suppose this could have it's own thread. I'll just leave it here though as long as people don't start getting the 2 interviews confused on what is said in each one. They really are quite similar though. He's really on a crusade against Game Works.
 

sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
3,273
149
106
Wow, he is lying about Batman:AA, too.

But back to Hairworks:
"Tessellation, Tessellation, Tessellation".

Or let me answer this in the words of AMD's pr machine Dave Baumann:
However, it certainly seems to the case that (consumer) [GCN] is not great for [Tessellation], which is still a curious choice given the interests in [Tessellation] by developers. That interest is only going to ratchet up further now as well.
So, nVidia's GPUs have only a 5% performance hit over the "optimize" AMD version. How can he actually say that this implementation is bad?!

/edit: Ah, Huddy will show us the contract of their Tomb Raider deal with Eidos. Great. I'm really curious to see this.

/edit 2: Haha, okay. "I'm making these assumptions, but I'm not in the position to proof these" - Huddy.

Nuff said.

/edit: 3: Okay, he lost me. He said that reviewers should a)not use Gaming Evolved titles in their benchmark parcour or b) they need to disable all these AMD feature implementations.

Haha. Seriously, he is trying so hard to convince these guys that "Gameworks" is bad that he "talked" himself into a corner.
 
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3DVagabond

Lifer
Aug 10, 2009
11,951
204
106
Wow, he is lying about Batman:AA, too.

But back to Hairworks:
"Tessellation, Tessellation, Tessellation".

Or let me answer this in the words of AMD's pr machine Dave Baumann:
So, nVidia's GPUs have only a 5% performance hit over the "optimize" AMD version. How can he actually say that this implementation is bad?!

/edit: Ah, Huddy will show us the contract of their Tomb Raider deal with Eidos. Great. I'm really curious to see this.

/edit 2: Haha, okay. "I'm making these assumptions, but I'm not in the position to proof these" - Huddy.

Nuff said.

/edit: 3: Okay, he lost me. He said that reviewers should a)not use Gaming Evolved titles in their benchmark parcour or b) they need to disable all these AMD feature implementations.

Haha. Seriously, he is trying so hard to convince these guys that "Gameworks" is bad that he "talked" himself into a corner.

You are either cherry picking out of context or we saw different interviews. I'll leave you with your opinions though. I can't be bothered to go through and time mark sections and then debate them.
 

sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
3,273
149
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You are either cherry picking out of context or we saw different interviews. I'll leave you with your opinions though. I can't be bothered to go through and time mark sections and then debate them.

You dont need to do it. He made it clear that nobody should use IHV sponsored games for benchmarks.

BTW i found this about TressFX in Tomb Raider:
TressFX however lacked much of this functionality, and so strands of hair that were hidden out of view were still being calculated. Still eating up a lot of GPU power, despite the fact that for all intents and purposes from our perspective of a player, they could never be viewed. Additionally, as mentioned above with the Level of Detail example, there should be ideally multiple Level of Details depending upon distance. TressFX 1.0 didn’t feature this, thus it didn’t matter how close the camera was to Lara, or how much of Lara was visible, the GPU was rendering the same work load.
http://www.redgamingtech.com/amd-tressfx-2-0-capable-of-doing-much-more-than-hair/

Oh, sounds familiar, right? :sneaky:

/edit:
Oh, Huddy needed to correct himself about TressFX: http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Planning-Open-Source-GameWorks-Competitor-Mantle-Linux
 
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Erenhardt

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 2012
3,251
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so strands of hair that were hidden out of view
is that even possible in the first place?

Its like saying: dont render parts of batman's caping cape that are hidden (inside folds etc.).

Its not even close to underground tasselated oceans.... but if Lara's head would be filled inside with tressfx hairs, then maybe
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
106
One would think by now that people would have learned not to trust PR spindoctors after being burned so many times.
 

Leadbox

Senior member
Oct 25, 2010
744
63
91
TWIMTBP plagued with issues
GE not so much
About sums it up?
<---This corespondent thinks so!
 
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KaRLiToS

Golden Member
Jul 30, 2010
1,918
11
81
True, it's getting toxic. Could use some regulation.

I agree, I have been using top hardware for the past 3 years, like really top hardware and I don't seem to find the same enjoyment as when I had my BFG Tech 8800GTX OC2 or my single HD 5850.



^^That was the shi....
shizzle
.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
You need to dispute the content. Anyone can simply say they don't believe something.

Disputing the content, funny you should mention that. Let's do that. Two points. First: It seems that Mr. Huddy's stories are already being disputed. Mr. Huddy told Ryan at PCPer that TressFX was made available to NV prior to release of Tomb Raider. This was not the case. When Tomb Raider was released, TressFX had zero information available to other IHVs.

Nvidia denied that this was the case and when pressed for the truth, AMD admitted that this was false. What Huddy told PCPer about TressFX was essentially, not the truth. TressFX was not made available until well after the release of Tomb Raider. From reading up on it, it seems that Nvidia was essentially caught by surprise when it was released, because they had no access to the game and TressFX was only available to the developer. Problem? Nvidia was not allowed access to any build of Tomb Raider, had zero information on TressFX, and were essentially forced to create a performance driver on their own. Also, unlike HBAO+ in Watch Dogs, the performance penalty for using it on NV hardware was severe and on AMD hardware, not so much. Quite the different story as compared to HBAO+ in Watch Dogs which performed similarly at launch between AMD and NV.

Sound familiar? Second point: Hilbert Hagedoorn, the owner of PC review site guru3d, seemed to indicate that Huddy is an untrustworthy person. He said the following:

I've spoken with Richard Huddy many times in the past, and the one thing that stuck -- always contradict and question what this man says.

I wouldn't read into that too much but it certainly sounds like this guy is untrustworthy to me. Which wouldn't be surprising, because really, when should you ever trust a marketing mouthpiece? (never). And he already mentioned some bad information that was not true to PCPer, in fact. Maybe it was unintentional, but nevertheless, since you wanted his information disputed, it seems that has happened. And his information was incorrect. Given what AMD did with TressFX at launch, and no information for TressFX was given to anyone until SOME TIME after launch, and it had a severe performance penalty on NV at launch......, it makes the situation about Huddy's gameworks whining seem odd to say the least.

Maybe AMD should just do what they really should have done a long time ago. Cut the marketing budget, fire some people, and apply that money towards software engineering personnel. This is the problem at AMD. Too much marketing, not enough of the stuff that is important: Just shut up and get stuff done which is what NV generally does (in my view) instead of whining. The problem is AMD throws their money at marketing instead of the stuff that matters such as software engineering. If AMD had proper resources for software development, their linux drivers would not be a disaster and they would not need to use their marketing mouthpieces to skew the truth when their software guys are stretched thin. I don't see AMD's software guys whining. They're the ones doing the real work, the important work, and they're the unsung heroes. But it seems to me the entire problem is THOSE guys, the important jobs, are not getting enough money or manpower.
 
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ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
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Exactly. Spindoctors are per definition untrustworthy.

But they hold the power of rhetorics to bend the weak minded into their will.

Its quite simple. Always look with a critical view on all information. Just like any historican would with their sources.
 
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sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
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I think that nVidia got builds with TressFX in it. But Nixxes didn't work together with them to improve the game for their hardware and they had never access to any source code of the game prio launch.

In the end there is no difference between Tomb Raider and Watch Dogs.

And the final version was broken on their hardware base.
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
I don't know. PCPer annotated their story to indicate that Mr. Huddy admitted his error: The SDK with TressFX was not made available until _after_ the release of Tomb Raider. Mr. Huddy originally stated that it was available as an SDK prior to TR's launch which was not the truth. Whether the developer (nixxes) allowed NV access prior to that, i'm not quite sure. But we do know the end result of the game being a disaster on NV hardware when it launched. And then NV followed up with a performance driver within the first week or so (IIRC).

I still don't see why this guy is so stuck on source code. NV presumably creates performance game optimized drivers without source code the majority of the time. AMD made a watch dogs performance driver without any source code. So where's the disconnect? The AMD marketing guys are whining about "source code" and are stuck on that, but you don't need source code for performance optimizations, fact of the matter is AMD and NV never get source code for anything or rarely if so. It doesn't matter.

Besides which, I think it's all fair game. They're both (NV + AMD) adding cool new graphical features to games, TressFX and HBAO+ are both compelling in different ways. Just leave it to the vendors to optimize for those features, whatever they are instead of playing the blame game. I still think if AMD put more money to the important jobs at AMD (software), they would never have to whine about these things. There are many industry insiders who have commented on the software guys at AMD being stretched too thin. AMD should fix this problem instead of bolstering their marketing budget.
 
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KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
3,034
1
81
It sounds to me that the AMD guy is making claims that can be verified as true or false.

And it seems he is making false claims.

Why would that be considered a good strategy? I can't figure it out. Seems to me the only benefit would be to whip up controversy and attention, perhaps angering Nvidia fans and pandering to AMD fans.

But if the idea is to sell more video cards, I think it's a lot more helpful to stick to the truth? Apparently this guy is just spouting off about speculations and assumptions, trying to get emotional reactions? Sorry if I'm mischaracterizing, but I don't think this strategy is a good idea or viable long-term.
 

sontin

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2011
3,273
149
106
They want to change the source code. Source code alone is absolut unnecessary for driver optimization because you see the source code through the API calls. And even Mr Huddy admitted that nVidia was able to optimze Tomb Raider through their drivers:
[...]and we also know that the game was available to NVIDIA several weeks ahead of the actual release for NVIDIA to address the bugs in their driver and to optimize for TressFX.
 
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