Discussing 7800 XTX, VRAM, Game Engines with an Infinity Ward Developer
Added 2023-04-14 20:10:33 +0000 UTCThe next episode of Broken Silicon will see us joined by a VFX Artist who works at Infinity Ward. This is somebody with extensive experience working both within Activision and Sony first party studios! Anything regarding CPUs, GPUs, and especially game development is on the table when it comes to subjects for discussion. At a minimum we plan to discuss:
- Current 12/8GB VRAM Issues on PC
- AMD's options to take market share w/ 7800 XTX, 7700 XT, 7600 XT
- Why Nvidia Skimped on VRAM despite Developers asking for more
- Game Engine Bottlenecks and Scaling Performance with CPUs
- Abandoning support for PS4 in order to move forward (or not)
- 4K 120FPS as a new midrange standard target for developers
Again, he can talk about anything regarding our usual subjects, recent hardware news, or things involving game development and engines. You have ~48 hours (Till early Afternoon on Sunday) to submit your thoughts and questions below! Be thoughtful, use good grammar, and be respectful to have your submission considered.
Previous Time Guest was on: https://youtu.be/239ntwGzg7c
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjreaytechart/
https://www.techspot.com/review/2657-amd-ryzen-7800x3d/
Comments
(preamble: hopefully I can get this in time, and he can answer it) Did AMD help at all to get the 7900 XTX to perform as well as the 4090, or how do you think that MW2 was able to run so well compared to other titles on it?
Hal Bouma
2023-04-16 22:53:55 +0000 UTCOh don't worry - I've noticed. Even though we recorded BS200 the night before release...I think it was pretty clear by then I was already fairly confident the 4070 was gonna bomb based on the early data I had.
Moore's Law Is Dead
2023-04-16 19:21:53 +0000 UTCAMD just announced two professional graphics cards based on Navi 31 and one was cut down to just 70 CUs and 16GB. If AMD released a consumer equivalent, what sort of MSRP do you think it would need in order to be successful?
Chris Rijk
2023-04-16 17:25:33 +0000 UTCFrame generation today can help improve visual smoothness but not responsiveness (latency). Are you aware of any alternative implementations or similar concepts that can help improve both smoothness and responsiveness?
Chris Rijk
2023-04-16 17:23:13 +0000 UTCHow easy do current game engines make it for developers to use lots of cores? Putting it another way, is the limiting factor more on game engine design or on developers making full use of existing game engines or APIs? Compared to efforts to optimise games for the GPU, how much work goes into game optimisation to reduce the CPU overheads or to make better use of many cores? Do you expect that ratio to change much in the coming years? (ie would you expect games to become more GPU limited or more CPU limited compared to today)
Chris Rijk
2023-04-16 17:12:20 +0000 UTCFor CPUs for games coming out in the next 3 years, are 8 cores going to be enough? (more than 8 "big" cores specifically). Do you foresee a time soon when gaming PCs will need more than 8 current generation cores? Let's say that next generation consoles use Zen 5 - based on current trends, would you expect them to use 8 standard cores or 16 "c" cores?
Chris Rijk
2023-04-16 17:03:19 +0000 UTCLet's say that someone wants to buy a new video card that will last for 3 years without running out of VRAM on AAA games on max settings (including ray-tracing). How much VRAM would you recommend for 1440p and for 4k? Are there any new or recent technologies that could help reduce the VRAM requirements on PC and how likely are they to be used?
Chris Rijk
2023-04-16 16:48:45 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Guest. As a VFX artist how do you feel ray tracing fits into games artistically? Is it something to design around/consider. Or is it just something you drop in that's supposed to make games better
yoda king
2023-04-16 09:17:55 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Guest. Given how 8 gigs of vram have become a concern lately how do you feel gaming laptops will fare in the future?
yoda king
2023-04-16 09:17:02 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Guest. Do you think that the switch to a new engine such as unreal engine 5 would allow companies to get rid of technical debt and thereby create games faster and of better quality?
yoda king
2023-04-16 09:16:20 +0000 UTCI once did but now I leave it a bit longer or will see if something is available for my budget (even if 2nd hand) for a decent uplift. My path was 8800 GTS, 9800 GX2, 480 GTX, 680 GTX, Maxwell Titan X, 1080 Ti (2nd hand), 4070 Ti. I used to do a full system build with every 2nd GPU upgrade.
Ryzza5
2023-04-16 05:38:27 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Guest, this is not really a question but more an observation for Tom. I think we can go ahead and claim the 4070 launch as lack luster. It’s Saturday afternoon and even MSRP cards are available all over the web here in the states. I hope this keeps up because the 4070 should be a 4060 and priced $350-400.
Loophole35
2023-04-15 19:27:53 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Guest, Any input on how Warzone 1 + MW19 had crazy high install size (200GB or so) but Warzone 2 + MWII 22 is less than half of that (~80GB)?
AdanFS
2023-04-15 18:38:50 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Guest, A recent, previous UE5 programmer spoke of pre-baked lighting being more difficult to program with than ray tracing. What are challenges of programming in-game lighting systems that do not use ray tracing and how many resources (rendering and labor hours) are devoted to non RT lighting? Should resources be freed up with RT, how can they reallocated and to what benefit for game developers and end users?
Sarcastro
2023-04-15 18:12:28 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Chris, It seems that developers have decided to no longer deal with vram as the current bottleneck. I'm curious about what could be the next potential bottleneck, such as HDD, 6-core CPUs, low-speed RAM, or other factors. Additionally, with developers having more resources to work with, what improvements can we expect to see? Thank you!
Arter
2023-04-15 17:06:21 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Guest, I have enjoyed the new Call of Duty release and game on a 7900xtx. Call of Duty is one of the few games where the 7900xtx can match a 4090, meaning that it bridges about a 20% gap relative to other titles. Is there any information you can share as to why this game seems to run faster on AMD gpus relative to Nvidia? Is that something you would expect to continue with future releases?
Alex Sloter
2023-04-15 12:21:57 +0000 UTCI would counter that with, do you really want to upgrade every 2 years considering these insane prices?
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-15 09:29:27 +0000 UTCAI is also the next best thing to get away with cheating, so it's a double-edged sword. Only time will tell how things will turn out, but I can imagine it's going to turn into another cat and mouse race.
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-15 09:27:32 +0000 UTCBut nothing is going to happen unless there is support for it in the first place. Just like Raytracing and the ability to stream assets itself.
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-15 09:25:29 +0000 UTCCould AMD add an 8-core Zen 3 chiplet to it's Radeon GPUs to handle asset streaming? I mean those chiplets are dirt cheap to manufacture and MI 300 seems to use an APU approach.
Mischa Jablonski
2023-04-15 09:01:28 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Chris. To Chris: what are the differences between developing call of duty for PS5 and XBOX s X? The GPU’s are fairly different to my eye and does that change development atall? Does your team yearn for the recently discussed pro consoles?
Tom
2023-04-15 08:57:22 +0000 UTCHello to the two of you! As for the guest, I do have a question: What performance-saving techniques do you use/prefer? Example: VRR, Upscaling, Frame-Generation or maybe even old-school methods to simply reduce draw calls, aggressive LODs, dithering or save on texture-memory by e.g. storing multiple greyscale textures within one RBG(A) texture file? I could ask a hundred more questions, but I'll leave it at that. :D Greetings from Germany, take care!
Dave Scholze
2023-04-15 07:50:42 +0000 UTCLooking back at previous GPU purchases, I have sometimes spent more than needed just so I can set everything to Ultra and not 'waste' time finding the best visual settings to target my desired frame rate and resolution. What steps to studios take to automatically select graphics options for a users detected hardware? When launching a game for the first time, is there an algorithm that adjusts various quality settings based on clock speed, shader cores, VRAM, bus-width, memory clocks, etc or is there manual QA validation? If you had to come up with an innovative improvement what ideas would you have?
Ryzza5
2023-04-15 03:34:22 +0000 UTCHi Tom & Chris. Are 16 and 24GB graphics such a big deal this year or is 12 enough? Futureproofing is fine if you plan on keeping hardware for 5-10 years but if we upgrade every 2 years or so is it really that big a deal to turn down a few settings? If tomorrow's games at Medium look as good as today's games at Ultra (before considering DLSS-style tricks) then why do you think Tom is making such a big fuss about VRAM? :) (love you, Tom)
Ryzza5
2023-04-15 03:26:47 +0000 UTCAgreed, never played the game nor had the interest too but he did a really good job in keeping it interesting the whole way through. Here’s the link to anyone who hasn’t seen the video. https://youtu.be/p5LfGcDB7Ek
Sad XTX 999
2023-04-15 00:06:36 +0000 UTCHey Tom & Guest. A lot of people feel the FPS genre is becoming stagnant and same. What in your personal opinion, do you think the FPS multi-player genre needs to evolve and grow, E.G. to break the current mold.
Travis Gooding
2023-04-14 23:45:57 +0000 UTCI thought about it and I think it comes down to there really being no standard of hardware for it. Nvidia could do it and make it proprietary to their hardware and AMD could do the same, so developers would have to optimize for both styles of acceleration and that would just add additional development time, especially on PC. Then each game engine would have to optimize for said hardware. Consoles have it, Xbox looks more conservative over Sonys co-processors, larger decompression unit and deeper API integration. Each game engine could optimize and evolve around that specific hardware feature, APIs are another story, Vulkan, DX-Linux wrappers, opengl, metal etc all would need standardized integration of it and it being hardware agnostic. I'm not especially knowledgeable in this stuff but if the field mentality is anything like the medical field I've worked in, a LOT of people won't touch something until it's standardized and heavily vetted
Travis Gooding
2023-04-14 23:40:41 +0000 UTCHey Tom and Chris, Based on the last MLID podcast with the semi-anonymous Unreal dev, it seems like a big part of the problems with optimizing games for PC is that the tools aren't all that great. So what sorts of tools would make the optimization process better/easier for developers, including VFX artists like yourself?
Cleansweep
2023-04-14 23:34:58 +0000 UTCThat video from g0at was incredible. Not even a Tarkov player and still blew me away.
Alexander
2023-04-14 22:22:14 +0000 UTCExplain why 8GB is plenty of VRAM for gamers(!)?
Jen-Hsun Huang
2023-04-14 22:12:02 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Guest, how long do you think Xbox will be in the game? I don’t want to sound pessimistic but it doesn’t seem like they will be a thing much longer at this rate and the fault in my opinion falls on Microsoft. That’s not to say developers like 343 are spotless. But Microsoft seems to like sabotaging themselves sometimes. Letting bungie go was a terrible mistake. I don’t like destiny but I can’t deny how big and popular the game is. If Microsoft took a page out of Sonys book and gave devs more creative freedom who knows, destiny could have been a platform exclusive. Imagine what the coalition could do if they weren’t forced to make gears of war all the time.
Sad XTX 999
2023-04-14 21:50:00 +0000 UTCHow is AI changing the the way we make games? Is it happening already?
DeadOfKnight
2023-04-14 21:41:28 +0000 UTCWhat I don't understand is why they can't add accelerators to specifically handle streaming textures and other assets to the GPU. If it's going to be such a big feature in the future, we can bet that silicon is going to shine like a sun (i.e. be used pretty much all the time making it worth the extra silicon).
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-14 21:26:49 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Guest, pc gaming seems to be plagued with hackers at ever corner and some outlets claiming 20 to 30 percent of players are hacking. With a recent video blowing up about Tarkov, where someone became a hacker to find hackers, his findings weren’t very encouraging. Is there a way to somehow get a hold on this problem? Or will it get worse? From what I’m seeing online, Ai seems to be the next best thing forward to catch cheaters.
Sad XTX 999
2023-04-14 21:25:53 +0000 UTCI remember YouTube videos talking about how people shouldn't run at Ultra settings, that lower settings look very passable, but I find that isn't true for textures in most AAA titles, RDR2 as a prime example. Why does the drop off for texture quality so much more noticeable?
FloridaMan
2023-04-14 21:15:19 +0000 UTCWith the 20%+ performance hit on the GPU that was discussed on a prior BS with the UE5 dev and GDC, I wonder what discussion devs have had about it and their game engines
Travis Gooding
2023-04-14 21:14:29 +0000 UTC2 questions. 1. I think it's safe to say, the PS4's SoC was designed impressively well. I am incredibly impressed a game like RE4 can run on the console and perform WAY above its weight, especially with that CPU it has. (Question) Has there been a recent release that came out on last or current Gen that impressed you or made you go "how did those devs manage that level of performance". 2. Tom and Dan have had a lot of really good talks recently about cross Gen and the pertuality of cross Gen as PS6 will likely need to be BC with PS5 and so on. Have you heard or been a part of any talks of features or settings that were implemented with forward thinking that anext Gen or pro model coming could utilize and make use of the additional power and if so, what features or settings could those be. **Side note on the topic of the current VRAM situation** I think the PS4 and development for it has been the crutch 4-8GB cards have relied on for years. With PS5 only games you can see 12GB Vram being at times the BARE minimum needed as 8GB as per HUB just does not work, crashes or significantly reduces the visual quality due to texture streaming issues or textures missing altogether. It's becoming such a big deal >now< because most pc port games now have been games that had ample development time on current Gen systems. People defending 8GB for 1080p are also in for a rude awakening because even at 1080p, some games are pushing that vram usage up and over 8gb.
Travis Gooding
2023-04-14 21:11:44 +0000 UTCWhat do you think is the best way for games to deal with running out of VRAM? Should they not apply the settings that would cause VRAM to run out and tell the user to lower settings? Should they use LODs and downsizing textures on the fly to keep consistent framerates? Should they crash to desktop? Should they try to swap textures out from system memory? Are there any considerations to what the consoles are capable of when implementing such things?
qhfreddy
2023-04-14 21:11:20 +0000 UTCDo you think there have been other "inflection points" with VRAM like we are having now where large portions of the market have the same amount of VRAM and are getting constrained at the same time?
qhfreddy
2023-04-14 21:07:58 +0000 UTCHow long until games take up 500GB of space?
DeadOfKnight
2023-04-14 20:35:47 +0000 UTCDoes the guest believe the Direct Storage API will be used and/or useful in the next year or two?
rafa zaya
2023-04-14 20:20:46 +0000 UTC
