When it comes to choosing GPUs, consumers basically only have two brands to choose from – NVIDIA or AMD, who then license out their technology to other companies such as ASUS, Sapphire, Gigabyte, MSI, and so on who then build on top of their technology, but at the end of the day, it’s still either NVIDIA or AMD’s technology that you’re using.
Well the good news for gamers who have an NVIDIA-based GPU in their computers is that if you were thinking of playing Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, you can look forward to better performance compared to AMD’s series of GPUs. This is because NVIDIA had worked closely with the developers at Ubisoft, since Watch Dogs fell under NVIDIA’s Gameworks program. What this means is that the developers were given a set of tools that allowed them to fully optimize all of NVIDIA’s technologies.
In fact Forbe’s editor, Jason Evangelho, recently compared the game using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 and an AMD Radeon 290x, and the results speak for themselves. NVIDIA’s GPU, which is priced around $200 cheaper than the Radeon 290x, either outperformed the competition, or at the very least managed to hold its own (see graph above), which is saying a lot for a GPU that you paid $200 less for!
While this is great for NVIDIA gamers, this is not good news for AMD gamers, and it is actually a move that some have criticized. In an article Joel Hruska of ExtremeTech wrote last year, “While GameWorks doesn’t technically lock vendors into Nvidia solutions, a developer that wanted to support both companies equally would have to work with AMD and Nvidia from the beginning of the development cycle to create a vendor-specific code path. It’s impossible for AMD to provide a quick after-launch fix. This kind of maneuver ultimately hurts developers in the guise of helping them.”
In the meantime you can check out the video above to see Watch Dogs in action using an NVIDA GPU.
Filed in . Read more about AMD, NVIDIA and Watch Dogs.