AMD Catalyst 15.5 Beta to Be Released in Wake of Project Cars, Witcher 3 Issues

AMD has announced that they will are currently developing a new driver update for AMD graphics cards, titled AMD Catalyst 15.5 Beta in hopes that this may fix the issues plaguing players of Project Cars and The Witcher 3 with AMD graphics cards.

Several complaints have been lodged by disgruntled consumers against all parties, including AMD, its direct competitor in the graphics card market NVIDIA, and even the developers of Project Cars and The Witcher 3, Slightly Mad Studios and CD Projekt RED, respectively. Many of the complaints stem from NVIDIA’s GameWorks technology, which is a set of proprietary APIs that NVIDIA has created for things like realistic hair, shadows, and destruction. Developers are able to use GameWorks in their games, but players have theorized that these technologies don’t work well on non-NVIDIA-based systems (see: AMD) and are actually crippling machines with AMD GPUs.

NVIDIA, however, doesn’t see it that way and offered a statement of refute on Reddit, stating, “The assumptions I'm seeing here are so inaccurate, I feel they merit a direct response from us.”

“I can definitively state that PhysX within Project Cars does not offload any computation to the GPU on any platform, including NVIDIA,” said senior director of GameWorks at NVIDIA Rev Lebaredian. “I'm not sure how the [original poster] came to the conclusion that it does, but this has never been claimed by the developer or us; nor is there any technical proof offered in this thread that shows this is the case.”

To the players who have asked NVIDIA to make PhysX open source, that is make the source code available to all, Lebaredian says that the source code for PhysX is available on GitHub, “so everyone is welcome to go inspect the code for themselves, and optimize or modify for their games any way they see fit.” However, in order to access the code, developers must first become registered members of the NVIDIA GameWorks developer program.

While AMD users wait for AMD Catalyst 15.5 Beta to be released, AMD has provided a work-around solution for the time being (found in the image below).

How has your experience been with Project Cars and/or The Witcher 3 on PC? Are you using an AMD or an NVIDIA graphics card? Do you have HairWorks turned on/off? Let us know in the comments below or reach out to me directly on Twitter @michaelfossbakk.