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Originally Posted by RejZoR
I'm NOT talking about NVIDIA at all. Developers can make such things not NVIDIA. Thats why i think its a bit pointless. Because even with all the data collected they have a very limited control over games. Basically just texturer filtering, FSAA, AF and other such things.
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From what I undertood they are going to chage even in-game settings. JHH mentioned close work with a lot of game developers for this task and this will surely extend into the future to much more games and developers.
Anyway, a lot of the games I play, I'd say as much as 75% of them create a txt config file in the game data path or in the documents folder, which would be supereasy to edit with an automatic txt editor built into the tool. I'm sure ALL games have such files even though some of them are hidden somewhere intead of being an accessible and easily recognizable text file.
They DO have a lot of control over how most games would look, with only a very small contribution from the game developers, basically pointing to the config file.
And as others said this is a task that is better performed by someone like Nvidia/AMD, Steam (would be better) or even Microsoft and not something done by every developer beause it costs a ton to collect and test all the data necessary to optimize every single system config out there, and if done ONCE it is much cheaper, than doing it all over again. That's why TWIMTBP and Game Evolved exist and MUST exist and why performance is so much better in said games. Optimizing is anything but easy and nowadays it is not
only that developers are lazy or tme contrained, it's that complexity is very high and they need the help from someone powerful and who has all the info on what kind of systems are out there and their capabilities, fetures, etc.
It's like with middleware, it exists because it's the better and cheaper option. Work it's done once and optimized once and then its adjusted for every game as required. In the case of Nvidia's new tool, it means that they will look extensively for which kind of impact each feature* has on each system. And only after this guideline is created, they will probably go on tweaking for every game they posibly can. The first part: looking for how each feature impacts performance on each of the multitude of hardware configurations is probably in the excess of 90% of the work done for each game. Of course Nvidia will have to do the last 10% a thousands times to covert all games, but it's still a better thing than each developer doing the 90%, because it's basically something they will NOT do, they will not spend time and money doing it, ever.
*Different lighting models, shadows, occlusion mapping, texture size and compression, shader lenght and complexity, tesselation, extension and variablity of accesses to sytem RAM and HDD for each card, everything else, you name it...