Bryan Heemskerk of Massive Damage, Inc (Telegrams for Guests)

Comparing the different architectures from the GPU/iGPU vendors, which have been easier to work with over the years and why? Do you see this changing going forward?

How many years do you think it will be until we will see handheld consoles that are capable of mild (but useful) amounts of Ray Tracing? Also, do you think Sony has exited the handheld console arena for good after they dropped the Vita like a bad habit?

What makes you choose which game engine to use? Have you thought about using a licensed one like frostbite or do you prefer to stick with something like unreal engine? Also, how would you educate yourself about video game engines whether it be to build one yourself or just how to pick one.

yoda king

How do you see game dev teams evolve(both social constructs and in relation to tech and tools evolving)? Now there has been trend to bigger and bigger teams like in hollywood, gigantic organizations, then occasionally splintering indie dev teams like early 2010s. Devs say pretty consistent, big teams,studios are good to learn trade skills, very small studios to pursue creative endeavor and try out new concepts. For gamer, outsider it looks gigantic machine which is blind to gamer feedback, so how will this go on? I dont see solution that all big corporations split into 2-man studios making 1000 small titles every month.

Timo H

What do you make of the Switch, and the OLED Switch being the same except for the screen? Is the memory capacity a real barrier to porting games? And how much would make Switch workable for devs, in most situations?

KarbinCry

In servers we are on the brink of the CXL era, where we will see benefits like a massive decrease in bus latency as well as cache coherency between CPUs and GPUs, and direct access to main memory for GPUs. Do you believe we will see this filter down to the consumer space? How would that affect rendering pipelines and gaming compute generally? What could we do in games with those capabilities that we can’t do now?

Deepest Learners

Hi, I don't know if your Studio already looked into AMD FSR, but for me the best thing about it is, that it's working with dynamic resolution. I really like the super stable 60fps on my PS5, and dynamic resolution is just necessary to achieve this. The thought of dynamic resolution combined with FSR makes me really excited.

digital_dodo

Good Day Tom and Bryan! I am a PhD student specializing in theory focusing on human being, nature, and perception (Rhetorical Ontology and Phenomenology with just a bit of Metaphysics for flavor if you want to be technical). The goal of my research is to demonstrate how a virtual environment can effectively influence human ideology, consciousness, and behavior. Or, as I jokingly describe it: how we can hack the human "soul" using immersive and interactive virtual worlds. To that end, I have been analyzing games which have a high degree of immersive and interactive world building. In your opinion, what are some of the best games in this regard? Additionally, what do you think are some of the best mechanisms for creating a strong sense of presence (narrative, soundscape, visual fidelity etc.)? Lastly, I'd like to offer my sympathies to Dan for similarly being a doctoral student and technophile. Indentured servitude is pretty rough. My sincerest thanks for all your hard work and great content! (Please feel free to abridge this question if you find it too long).

Hey Tom and Bryan, over the past few years with zen flipping everything on its head and Radeon graphics cards once again competing with Nvidia cards; what is your take on this as a game developer? Has this new hardware arms race been as influential on the gaming space or will it take a long time for this new hardware to be utilized to its full capabilities?

With the consoles having dedicated hardware for asset streaming and audio, in addition to the 16 thread Zen 2 CPUs, how will future CPU-heavy console games translate to the PC space? What is comparable to the consoles? Do the higher clocks of a R7 3700x make up for the lack of dedicated silicon, or is the higher IPC of Zen 3 or higher needed, or even more threads like a 3900x/5900x?

In your experience what single specification of the hardware you’re making games for do developers typically wish they had more of i.e. more ram, faster storage speeds, more cpu cores etc.? Thanks.

Billy Mays

I would like to know about the future of RT in game dev CG fx. At first, we were promised that RT would lower the development cost of good looking games. By removing the need of laber intensive prebake shedow and lighting. Few years later, what had RT brings to the table? And will it change the gaming industry like rasterization did in the 90s? Thank You very much.

Type2501

Tonga was a GCN 3.0 chip where the 290/390 Hawaii gpu was GCN 2.0. Tonga was used in the 285X and 380(X). They call it Antigua in the 380(X) but let's be fair it's Tonga. But if you ask me it's was to early to cut support for GCN 2.0 and later since the 390(X) and Fury cards are not that old. And if you still support Polaris GCN 4.0 and Vega GCN 5 I can not image is that hard to also support older versions. The differences between GCN 3. 0 and 4.0 are not that big. Same goes for 2.0 vs 3.0.

Frank van de Pol

What do you think are some of the biggest weaknesses many programmers in the gaming space have? I personally think that so many games are brought down by bad planning/management, lack of principled design, and an often afterthought based approach to performance and other issues...

qhfreddy

My god 🤬 aren't you tired of those people that don't read through the article before asking and commenting 🤪 I will now go to the hospital.. After RIGHTFULLY giving myself a facepalm through my head! Have a nice day and thank you for clarifying 🙂

Joachim Haugen

I don't get why Microsoft won't give is a option to configure how it looks: round/or classic corners, adjustable transparancy and a way to select the colors of different Ui elements should not be to hard and will make it way more personal for the people that want to customize it.

Frank van de Pol

Not a low clockspeed for laptop versions... ;)

Moore's Law Is Dead

Hi maybe this is off subject, but recently the new dg2 had performance close to a 3070 at 1,8GHZ in a leak/test Isn't 1,8GHZ a relative slow clock speed, if you compare to AMD on 7 NM? How much of Big Navi clock speed/ipc is due to the design, and how much is the TSMC's node?

Joachim Haugen

I'm curious what the process of planning for a new platform like say the PS5 / XBSX/S, or even for a given target PC spec, is like when you start to develop a game years ahead of the release of that platform. Assuming that you are developing directly for that platform, and not for current gen and then porting to next gen, what is that like? Is there a lot of guesswork / hoping, or are the hardware manufacturers able to give you a specific enough spec far enough out that it's not too big of an issue?

Alexander

This is something that I've always wanted to ask a game dev, that gets a lot of discussion on reddit (unfortunately probably from people who dont know what they're talking about). Moving forward, how many cores/threads is "enough"? (assuming a non CPU bound resolution like 1440p) With the PS5 an Xbox being 8 core designs, are developers moving to 8 being the new "sweet spot" or do you think 4 or 6 cores is really going to be all you need for the next 3-5 years?

B. Fish

Hey Tom and Bryan, with products like Raptor Lake, Zen 4, RDNA3, and Nvidia Next Gen on the horizon that are rumored to have massive jumps in gaming performance, how will this rumored boost in performance cause a shift in game development? My current rig has an i9 9900k with a 6800XT in it, and I find it very easy to run games at 4k Ultra 100+fps. At a certain point wouldn't developing games to run at 8k Ultra 120fps just be too ridiculous? Would focusing more compute power on improved AI, photorealism, world building, asset streaming, and more realistic lightning make more sense for the future of gaming?

Kinihun25

That's a very good question for him. FYI - he was literally at the RTX Launch Event, and talked to many devs about it on launch day :)

Moore's Law Is Dead

Hi Bryan and Reesie's owner! How much of a difference do you think there will be between the console approach of copying SSD data into shared memory for decompression by an accelerator versus DirectStorage, which seems to be copying SSD data into system memory to then be routed to the GPU and be decompressed there? Also do you think dedicated compression/decompression HW will ever come to consumer PC's, such as Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator, debuting in Sapphire Rapids? Cheers as always.

AC_666__

Hi I have two questions? First what is the initial reaction that programmers and developers that you knew had when ray tracing started to become more than buzz word in the gaming industry? Second What are your thoughts on Unreal 5? I have been playing around with the new engine and I noticed that it seems to like my 6800XT alot more than Unreal 4 ever did.

MelodicWarrior