Wow photonboy, why I do agree with you that gameworks is not only bad and discussing it's use is more complicated, but it does look like you are blinded by your green love.
The fact is that NVIDIA has more marketshare and more money that AMD and they are clearly using that advantage to push AMD further down. Which is very bad for us consumers because we want freedom of choice when we buy a new GPU. All vendor lock-in is bad no matter who does it.
The only two potential vendor lock-ins from AMD we have seen the last couple of years are Mantle and TressFX. AMD has told everyone that it was going to be open Mantle technology but that they wanted to keep control over it in the beginning as that was more efficient. Mantle now is deprecated as most of its technology is now included into the successor of OpenGL: Vulcan. So AMD's technology is now actually open for anyone including Nvidia. The first version of TressFX worked only well for AMD GPU's but TressFX has been open-source from the beginning. Nvidia or anyone else could have easily added to that. But with the next version AMD made it so that it works just as well on AMD as on Nvidia cards, it is even slightly faster than Nvidia's Hairworks on Nvidia GPU's.
Nvidia on the other hand has done many vendor lockins or released tech that can run on AMD but runs badly.
1) CUDA, Nvidia only, luckily with OpenCL and DirectCompute alternatives exist but the fact is that CUDA is and was Nvidia only
2) PhysX, while Nvidia does have a CPU path that is single core only for those without an Nvida GPU it intentionally cripples performance. When Nvidia just purchased PhysX and ported it to run on their GPU (instead of the Ageia card) People with AMD cards could purchase a second GPU of Nvidia to run PhysX on that, but Nvidia disabled this in later drivers so only if your main GPU is Nvidia can you accelerate this, just pathetic and bad for gamers.
3) G-Sync, luckily AMD launched a standard open technology alternative with FreeSync, G-Sync is another vendor lock-in, tech and alway will be.
4) GameWorks, while I can see the benefit of giving game developers access to code that makes it easier for them to use new graphics technology, Nvidia clearly intends of giving this tech only to Nvidia GPU owners. Some of it does run on AMD GPU's (HairWorks) but not very well. GameWorks is not open source and therefore AMD cannot add optimized code-paths for their GPU's even if they wanted to. Game developers can pay Nvidia to get the source code, so they could add an optimized code path for AMD GPU's but that is very unlikely as A) that code needs to be adjusted again and again for each new gameworks release as its not going into the original source, B) the fact that a game dev is using gameworks instead of making something themselves means its very unlike like they have the time/skill/resources of fixing it on AMD cards. GameWorks therefore becomes in practice another item on the long list of Nvidia vendor lock-in tech.
While what NVidia does is not illegal or bad in it self, the only advantage of their policy is to their own wallets. For consumers like us vendor lock-in is always bad as you loose the freedom (or at least it becomes very hard) to choose any other vendor. And so instead of buying the best performing card at a specific price, you must choose the Nvidia one otherwise you loose CUDA/GSYNC/PhysX and Gameworks
Another problem is that game developers do not choose the best technology for the job. If they are sponsered by Nvidia they will use HairWorks instead of TressFX while for all gamers TressFX would have been the better choice. Its just politics. So what we as consumers need are new open standards technologies that will allow us new and better technology without loosing our freedom of choice.
As it is right now AMD is the good-guy and Nvidia the bad-guy, thats just a fact. It could very well be that if AMD was the bigger one the roles would be swapped, who knows. Personally I can still understand if someone buys a Nvidia GPU but I am worried that in the future we have to pay more for our GPU's while getting less improvements as these vendor lock-ins destroy the free market where there are only two players left right now.
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