Bethesda Collaborating With Amd

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3174806/gaming/amd-radeon-infuses-bethesda-games-with-vulkan-cozies-up-to-a-geforce-now-rival.html

The lines are being drawn in the sand between Wintel and AMD with game developers now jumping on the AMD bandwagon as, true to form, Microsoft makes more aggressive moves to monopolize the video game market. What's so special about this particular partnership is the engineers from both companies are working together to produce a video graphics architecture that suits more of the specific bandwidth needs of gamers rather than the broader requirements for servers and AI supercomputers. This is where AMD shines as the underdog competition often providing improvements in efficiency that benefit gamers specifically by driving down prices and, eventually, they become adopted by the entire industry. While Nvidia and Wintel have the lead in fabrication and technology in many respects, they are so busy adding new bells and whistles and shooting for the high end server and AI market that focusing on efficiency and reducing costs for gamers is just not what they are famous for.

The new Vega graphics cards should be out in a couple of months and by the end of the year we should see the impact of all this competition when everyone starts adding HBM2 to every chip imaginable. HBM is more expensive than using other types of memory, but the ability to use small amounts of it in conjunction with arithmetic acceleration units allows a small amount of HBM to replace a much larger amount of cheaper memory. Another interesting aspect of all this is that Otoy has already produce a compiler for Nvidia Cuda code that can make even a game optimized for Nvidia cards play on AMD graphics cards reducing the differences between the capabilities of the two.

AMD and ATi have helped to drive the prices of Intel and Nvidia hardware down over the years and drive down the prices of video game equipment in particular and we should see plenty of dramatic moves from everybody involved for the hearts of video gamers over the next three years in particular simply due to the entire industry changing dramatically as they shift to more analog architectures and creating an entirely new architecture for the basic PC. Just this week Nvidia released a driver update that dramatically improves frame rates for many games giving you some idea of how much room there always is for improvements in efficiency as these chips become ever more complicated. AMD's Raven Ridge will be coming on the market soon with the power of a PS4 in a small chip that takes about 35 watts and we should see that kind of leap in efficiency periodically over the next three years which is unusual when perhaps 15-20% improvement is pretty standard from one year to the next.

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3155266/software-games/watch-out-geforce-now-liquidsky-lets-you-stream-pc-games-from-the-cloud-for-free.html

Here's an article on "Liquid Sky" the cloud based gaming service that is involved in all this collaboration with Bethesda and AMD and is about to offer their service online for free. Cloud based computing is the future for data intensive applications like gaming and is one area where companies like Bethesda can distinguish themselves from the competition. That AMD has targeted Bethesda for this collaboration may in part be due to the proprietary algorithms that Liquid Sky owns which may cut to the chase better than most on the bandwidth requirements for video games in general and how to make huge savings merely re-configuring everything better for bandwidth. That's essentially what they are doing with all the other work with Bethesda is looking at ways to improve bandwidth and make everything more efficient and AMD's specialty is their modular designs and, now, distributed memory and processing. In doing so they can figure out, for example, what is the minimum amount of hardware that a PC gaming device might need for a good experience and what is the maximum and apply it to the scalar architecture.

Games can be played back in any number of ways on a computer with id software's "Rage" being an extreme example due to its graphics being literally streamed right off of your hard drive despite it being the slowest memory you can access. What they did was "bake" certain effects like lighting into the textures of the game and devised a complex compression and decompression routine that allows a computer to stream the game right onto your screen with less graphics card use and taking advantage of up to 24 cores on a cpu at once. The original hope was to transform the compression scheme of Rage into a way to stream ray traced geometry onto a screen fast enough and others like Otoy and Imagination are already well on their way to making real time ray tracing possible, but compression schemes and the cloud are ways to add even more ray traced geometry to the game itself and still run it on the same hardware. All of which would be just so much unnecessary Byzantine weirdness if we had a cpu that was even a thousand times faster than our current ones and John Carmack, who developed Rage and the original Quake engine used extensively to this day, has often remarked that a terahertz cpu has been at the top of his Christmas wish list for many years.

 

AMD processors run hot. I recently "felt the warmth" at a local Best Buy Store.

It's so simple... Go up to a laptop running an AMD processor and feel the space above the keyboard. It's hot. Now go up to a laptop running with an Intel processor and feel the same place. It's cool.

Just thought I'd share that since someone mentioned them. Wu, I guess you're talking about gaming.

Is that on a laptop with AMD? I wonder about gaming on my laptop. I just bought a new one, but it isn't supposed to be for gaming. Maybe I should try it out. It's literally just out of the box, and currently charging up the battery, because I don't know if they come fully charged or whatever... I want it to charge up fully for the first use (even though it's a refurbished machine, LOL).

 

Liquid Sky is available for free and allows you to play any game you happen to own on any cellphone, laptop, or desktop.

Yeah, AMD chips run hot because they specialize in chips that are easy for gamers to overclock giving them similar performance to a much more expensive Intel chip.

AMD is merely doing research with these people related to their next generation graphics architecture which, by all accounts, is an entirely different animal altogether from anything they've done in the past. Their new Vega has reportedly 12 & 24 teraflops of performance using half the electricity while, at the extreme end, Nvidia's upcoming Volta gpu can do somewhere around 40 teraflops. Those are just outrageous numbers that the video game industry has never seen before and has almost no clue what to do with that much computing power because it makes anything they are already familiar with all too easy. Among other things, what it means is that by knocking their heads together they may find new ways to make what is currently expensive video gaming equipment outrageously cheap within the next few years including enough graphics power to run VR or whatever.

Crysis became a video gaming landmark when it was first released because it required a computer almost nobody could afford just to play the game. However, people bought the game just to see how their own computer stacked up and, within a few short years, gamers everywhere could afford a computer that would actually play Crysis and now you can play a version of it on your cellphone. Within three years the industry should drive the price way down for the hardware required to run the most graphics intensive video games on the market today from what is currently a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars for a rig to less than half of that and the price will just continue to drop. Within a few decades, nobody will give a damn anymore about what kind of hardware is in their machine because it will all do pretty much whatever the hell they normally want it to do and they'll just buy things based on brand names and warranties.