The public battle of words between AMD and Nvidia rages on after the recent accusations that Nvidia intentionally tweaked code tank the performance of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on AMD cards.

Earlier this week, AMD’s chief gaming scientist, Richard Huddy, claimed that Nvidia’s HairWorks code “completely sabotaged our performance … it’s wrecked our performance, almost as if it was put in to achieve that goal.”

But Nvidia GameWorks spokesperson Brian Burke denied any foul play, saying that Nvidia is not to blame for AMD’s performance problems.

“GameWorks improves the visual quality of games running on GeForce for our customers. It does not impair performance on competing hardware,” Burke told PC Perspective. “Demanding source code access to all our cool technology is an attempt to deflect their performance issues. Giving away your IP, your source code, is uncommon for anyone in the industry, including middleware providers and game developers. Most of the time we optimize games based on binary builds, not source code.”

“I would assume that AMD could have done the same thing”

Burke added, “The bottom line is AMD’s tessellation performance is not very good and there is not a lot NVIDIA can/should do about it. … I believe it is a resource issue. NVIDIA spent a lot of artist and engineering resources to help make Witcher 3 better. I would assume that AMD could have done the same thing because our agreements with developers don’t prevent them from working with other IHVs. (See also, Project Cars).”

Eurogamer tested The Witcher 3 on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, comparing frame rates on each with HairWorks turned on and off. Their tests found that while the performance for both cards was lower with HairWorks on, the AMD card suffered from drastically reduced frame rates compared to Nvidia. Both were roughly equivalent with HairWorks turned off.

AMD has yet to comment on Burke’s burn, but we are eagerly awaiting the unfolding drama with popcorn ready. So far, Poland-based Witcher developer CD Projekt RED is wisely staying as far from this conflict as it can.

Image credit: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt