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| Balkanized Gaming: Nvidia GameWorks Now A Core Part Of UE4; AMD Counters With Mantle Integration In CryEngine |
A pair of announcements from Nvidia and AMD at GDC today drew up the battle lines for 2014 as both companies announced critical new partners for 2014 and beyond. First, Nvidia announced that its proprietary software libraries, bundled under the GameWorks brand name, are now a core component of Unreal Engine 4. In other words, GameWorks won’t be an added package that developers sign up to use when building games — it’ll be the de facto standard. That’s potentially problematic for anyone who doesn’t own an Nvidia GPU.
AMD, meanwhile, has fired back with news that it’s partnering with Crytek to bring full Mantle support to games built with the new CryEngine — the follow-on successor to CryEngine 3, the engine that powered Crysis 3. Technically this new version of the CryEngine, which was rebuilt from the ground up, is CryEngine 4, but Crytek has recently decided to drop version numbers from its branding — so for now and forever it will simply be called CryEngine.
Both companies were crowing with pride in their respective PR releases, with Tim Sweeney declaring that “Epic developed Unreal Engine 4 on Nvidia hardware, and it looks and runs best on GeForce.” Cevat Yerli, meanwhile, told the world that “By integrating AMD’s new Mantle API, CryEngine will gain a dimension of ‘lower level’ hardware access that enables extraordinary efficiency, performance and hardware control.”
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