Nvidia responds to AMD's Watch Dogs claims
"The deals we do, and the GameWorks agreements, don't have anything to do with restricting access to builds"
Nvidia's director of engineering and developer technology has responded to accusations from its rival, AMD, regarding its GameWorks toolset. Accusations that suggested GameWorks was "crippling performance" for its competition and that Watch Dogs was the latest example.
"I've heard that before from AMD and it's a little mysterious to me. We don't and we never have restricted anyone from getting access as part of our agreements. Not with Watch Dogs and not with any other titles," Cem Cebenoyan told Forbes.
"Our agreements focus on interesting things we're going to do together to improve the experience for all PC gamers and of course for Nvidia customers. We don't have anything in there restricting anyone from accessing source code or binaries. Developers are free to give builds out to whoever they want. It's their product."
It was Robert Hallock, AMD's head of technical communications, software and technologies who first made the allegations in regard to Watch Dogs.
"Gameworks represents a clear and present threat to gamers by deliberately crippling performance on AMD products (40 per cent of the market) to widen the margin in favour of NVIDIA products," Hallock told Forbes last week.
"Participation in the Gameworks program often precludes the developer from accepting AMD suggestions that would improve performance directly in the game code-the most desirable form of optimisation."
Cebenoyan rebuffed this idea and made clear that nothing in the GameWorks tools limit AMD performance, and Nvidia would never stop a company like Ubisoft from making changes that would allow a title to work better with AMD hardware.
"I can tell you that the deals that we do, and the GameWorks agreements, don't have anything to do with restricting anyone's access to builds."