“In addition,” he said, “collaboration with other technology providers across the ecosystem will ensure the best possible end-to-end gaming experiences, such as working with display manufacturers to incorporate AMD FreeSync technology to deliver fluid, stutter-free gaming visuals on next-generation displays.But that next-gen push toward higher fidelity and true-to-life visuals and effects comes at a cost, both in terms of CPU cores and higher graphics performance.
“Ray tracing, for example, carries a heavy performance penalty compared to traditional rasterization techniques,” Herkelman said, adding that AMD provides both CPUs and GPUs, putting the company in a unique position to work with the gaming ecosystem on improving visual experiences.
The results of that knowledge are new technologies like AMD SmartShift, which optimizes performance by automatically shifting power between AMD CPUs and GPUs, and AMD Smart Access Memory, which gives the CPU full access to high-speed GPU VRAM.
“Because of the increased level of visual fidelity, games will naturally become larger in size, requiring more space for high-resolution textures and possibly causing longer load times,” Herkelman said. “To mitigate this potential bottleneck, the new generation of gaming PCs and consoles will utilize speedy PCIe 4.0 storage, which will significantly reduce load times.” The company is also working on improvements meant to target quality-of-life issues.
“There are also a host of other technologies that will make games more fluid, immersive and responsive, such as the AMD FidelityFX developer toolkit that provides sharper, crystal clear visuals, and Radeon Anti-Lag that reduces the delay between a mouse or keyboard click and the resulting on-screen response – providing a competitive advantage in esports and other games,” he said.
All of these improvements and leaps in technology will deliver a more immersive, awe-inspiring gaming experience, with more exciting effects, cinematic visual fidelity, and incredible performance where load times will become a thing of the past.
“All of these improvements and leaps in technology will result in a streamlined gaming experience with less waiting, more exciting effects, higher performance, and incredible visual fidelity.”
Intel
Intel’s core belief is that the PC, as the leading open, versatile, high-performance gaming platform, continues to be the best place for those innovations to drive the gaming experience forward, said Kim Pallister, general manager of gaming solutions at Intel Corporation. The company believes the decade will see massive advances in the gaming experiences offered, led by a couple of key underlying trends.
Increased availability of cloud compute will make games better, he said.
“Especially exciting is those that will make use of both a powerful client and powerful compute and storage in the cloud,” he said.
This will allow developers to devote significantly more backend compute to grow the size and concurrent populations of the worlds they create – while also ramping up the degree of interaction possible in these worlds.
“Server-based physics is a common bottleneck that has great potential for even more parallelism, which will lead to finer and more realistic interactions amongst larger, richer, more populated worlds,” he added. “The huge multi-user events that Epic has hosted in Fortnite, or how Microsoft is streaming highly-detailed worlds in Flight Simulator – these are only the beginning. Cloud will also help game creators who will use data centers in development workflows that rely on machine learning to enhance asset quality and variability and even NPC’s AI and animation (for example, DeepMotion). With huge amounts of server-side power, researchers are now unleashed to develop and easily deploy more and more algorithm-based improvements to tackle all facets of the user experience. (e.g. denoising/super sampling).” Another big trend Intel is following is the increased improvements in underlying silicon compute power, efficiency, and parallelism.
Pallister said that this will continue to drive opportunities for developers to enhance client and server computation, with a steady stream of advancements in compilers and tools being released to improve the power and efficiency to all types of games. He points to examples like the work the company is doing with Epic using ISPC to get more performance out of Chaos Physics.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog