Eidos spills the beans?
As is HEXUS' responsible practice, we ask companies to validate their claims and Chris Hook AMD's Sr. Manager Public Relations for its GPU Division, authorised the release of the email chain, referred to by Richard Huddy in his posting on the HEXUS.community, to HEXUS.
Although HEXUS previously published this email chain, subsequent to discussions with AMD's legal counsel and that we now understand that that the original email chain was slightly abridged, we have since decided that to continue to publish these emails serves no substantial ongoing purpose.
Suffice to say that HEXUS has been satisfied as to the existence and substance of the emails referred to by AMD and that, interpreting the email chain, it appears that the NVIDIA code optimisations and agreement with Eidos prevent AMD's cards from running in-game antialiasing.
Huddy's also stated that further AMD attempts to enable AA in the game have been met with the same restrictions imposed by the NVIDIA code.
NVIDIA's Lars Weinand may well not be in the loop as to the ramifications of NVIDIA's optimisations, of course, so putting the blame squarely at AMD's door would seem to be a logical move.
The entire episode can be viewed one of two ways. On the one hand, NVIDIA's spent money and resources in enabling AA for an engine - Unreal Engine 3.5 - that doesn't natively support it under DX9 due to the use of deferred shading (DX10 is fine, though), so why should AMD be given the code, gratis, to enable AA on its hardware? The counterpoint, as AMD may well argue, is that the company is (at a later stage than NVIDIA) prepared to put in the legwork but is apparently claiming it isn't being given an opportunity of doing so, especially as the antialiasing function exists in DX10.
What do you think? Do today's revelations in any way vindicate AMD's McNaughton in his original assertions? We'd love to hear your thoughts here in the HEXUS.community.
