The news today from Nvidia and Ubisoft is an expanded partnership between the two is in place for Assassin’s Creed Unity, Far Cry 4, and Tom Clancy’s The Division.

NVIDIA’s GameWorks Team is working closely with Ubisoft’s development studios to incorporate cutting edge graphics technology and gaming innovations to create game worlds that deliver unprecedented realism and immersion. NVIDIA’s GameWorks technology includes TXAA antialiasing, which provides Hollywood-levels of smooth animation, soft shadows, HBAO+ (horizon-based ambient occlusion), advanced DX11 tessellation, and NVIDIA PhysX technology.

“Working with NVIDIA has enabled us to bring an enhanced gameplay experience to our PC players,” said Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing, Ubisoft. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with NVIDIA on our biggest upcoming titles.”

You can read the entire announcement at http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/en-US/press/detail.aspx?cid=tcm:99-146531-16&ctid=tcm:95-27313-32

I asked Robert Hallock about this specifically, and he explains that they had “very limited time with the title and [we’ve] been able to implement some respectable performance improvements thanks to the skill of our driver engineers. Careful performance analysis with a variety of internal tools have allowed us to profile this title, despite deliberate obfuscation attempts, to improve the experience for users.”

The article goes on to explain how Watch Dogs’ development was done as part of Nvidia’s Gameworks program. Gameworks gives game developers a proprietary set of tools that helps to harness the power of Nvidia’s technologies. In addition Nvidia’s own engineers work with the game developer to ensure a highly optimized game, for Nvidia products that is. The bad news is that this largely blocks AMD from the development and optimization process of the game.

“AMD is no longer in control of its own performance. While GameWorks doesn’t technically lock vendors into Nvidia solutions, a developer that wanted to support both companies equally would have to work with AMD and Nvidia from the beginning of the development cycle to create a vendor-specific code path. It’s impossible for AMD to provide a quick after-launch fix. This kind of maneuver ultimately hurts developers in the guise of helping them.”

While Nvidia seems to push proprietary technologies on developers with things like G-Sync and ShadowPlay, AMD has gone down a different path entirely with things like FreeSync and the Mantle API. It’s hard to argue that closed development and proprietary technologies are a good thing for the industry in the long term, but with Nvidia taking at least 60% of the market share, is there anything AMD can do?

Head over to Forbes.com to read Jason Evangelho’s entire article. He even gives a short benchmark comparison between an AMD Radeon 290x($500) vs an Nvidia GTX770 ($300).

Though the event was sponsored by Nvidia for their G-Sync technology the three speakers hit on a varied selection of topics and really created an AMA event that will be remembered .

For the full transcript check out The Digital Foundry