Rumor: AMD will be the GPU choice on all three next generation consoles

• July 14, 2011
• Written by Mark
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With news starting to surface about the next generation consoles, rumors are starting to surface about the hardware specs that they will use. It was recently announced that the successor to the Nintendo Wii, the Wii U, will use an AMD Radeon GPU for its graphiscs. Rumors are also starting to fly that Sony will start production of PS4 at end of 2011 for a possible 2012 release. If all of this is true then there is no doubt that development is well underway on these next-generation consoles and there is a good bet that the preliminary hardware design has already been laid out. Now [H]ardOCP.com has posted an interesting article about rumors that have surfaced from E3 2011 on the next generation console hardware that these consoles will use and according to HardOCP, “Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, are looking very much to be part of Team AMD for GPU”.

If this is true that AMD GPUs will be used for all of the next generation consoles then this could possibly spell certain doom for PhysX or force NVIDIA to port it OpenCL or make it CPU accelerated only. Since GPU accelerated PhysX requires a CUDA capable NVIDIA GPU there would be no way for developers to implement GPU PhysX into their games on consoles that use AMD GPUs. They could always use the CPU Accelerated PhysX like it is done now with many titles but with NVIDIA continuing to push GPU accelerated PhysX for games this will no doubt means an uncertain future for PhysX.

From E3 Rumors on Next Generation Console Hardware:

What looks to be a “done deal” at this point is that AMD will be the GPU choice on all three next generation consoles. Yes, all the big guns in the console world, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, are looking very much to be part of Team AMD for GPU. That is correct, NVIDIA, “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” But NVIDIA already knew this, now you do too.

Read the rest of the article at [H]ardOCP.

Bad News for Nvidia and PhysX, Ubisoft to Use Havok Middleware for Future Games.

• October 9, 2009
• Written by Mark
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It is being reported over at Xbitlabs that game maker Ubisoft plans to use the Havok Physics Middleware for all of it’s future game development. This is potentially bad news for Nvidia and PhysX as Ubisoft is one of the major game developers that will not be using or promoting PhysX, read the full article here.

Havok, a video game development software firm that is owned by Intel Corp., said this week that it had signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Ubisoft, a leading game publisher, to use Havok’s software and middleware products in upcoming titles across all platforms. The decision will allow Ubisoft to use industry-standard tools better suited for multi-threading hardware.

“Ubisoft consistently delivers many of the greatest brands in the video games industry and we are thrilled to be named as its long-standing middleware partner. Havok offers the best solutions across all gaming platforms. We believe in providing the most advanced technology to developers while backing our unmatched expertise with first class global support,” said David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok.

The two companies did not name which of Havok’s middleware will be used for future games. At present Havok’s family includes six key products:

* Havok AI – provides developers with an optimized cross-platform SDK to perform navigation mesh generation, pathfinding and path following in highly dynamic game environments.
* Havok Animation – a fast and flexible animation SDK and tool chain that provide optimized playback and real-time blending on current and next-generation game systems.
* Havok Behavior – a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game.
* Havok Cloth – a platform-optimized runtime and toolset that increases the believability of game characters and environments. It allows character designers to go beyond simplistic tight-fitting or hand-animated clothing, and to add believable, physically-based motion to garments like skirts, capes, shirts, trousers and coats, as well other deformable items like hair, bellies or tails.
* Havok Destruction – a cross-platform tool for simulation of rigid body destruction.
* Havok Physics – a real-time collision detection and physical simulation solution.

“We’ve always appreciated Havok’s willingness to listen and work with us on serious and sophisticated commercial and technical issues. Havok goes the extra mile to understand the complexities of our business and the challenges development teams face,” said Pierre Escaich, studio operations director of Ubisoft.

Renegade X UT3 Mod Open Beta on September 30th, New Trailer

• September 5, 2009
• Written by Mark
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Renegade X the UT3 modification that is pretty much a remake of C&C Renegade on the Unreal 3 Engine has been given an open beta release date along with a new game play trailer. The mod being developed by Totem Arts looks very impressive from the trailer. Whether or not you are a die hard C&C Renegade fan or looking for a good reason to reinstall UT3 or actually purchase it you may want to keep an eye on this and try it out on September 30th.

From the Renegade X mod DB page:

Renegade X is coming soon to a computer near you. The Renegade X open beta will begin on September 30th of this year! We, Totem Arts, have been working hard on getting this mod to its followers for the past couple years, and the time is finally drawing near. As of now, all of our first release content has been finished, and the team is going forward with polishing this project.

Renegade X (formerly known as Renegade 2007) is a mod dedicated to recreating C&C Renegade in the new generation engine, the Unreal Engine 3. We all believe the Command and Conquer series is a very special one, and its fans have been following its games for over a decade now. C&C has been one of the most successful videogame series in the RTS Genre. Our modding team believes that C&C Renegade is truly a hidden gem in the FPS genre.

C&C Renegade’s specialty was its multiplayer mode, because it was not mindless killing like most games. A player was thrown into a battle as soon as he joined a server, in which teamplay was the only way to win. The game revolves around a war between the Global Defense Initiative, and the Brotherhood of Nod. Each faction would have their own base of operations consisting of buildings. A team had to work together to destroy the enemy base, while keeping theirs intact. By simply switching engines, our team will have fixed many of C&C Renegade’s faults. The original game had many problems such as bad netcoding, poor graphics, glitches, etc. Our main goal is to bring this great gameplay to the masses, all the graphical enhancements is merely just icing on the cake.

AI on the GPU: InstinctTech DogFighter CudaDemo

• September 3, 2009
• Written by Mark
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In the near future we may not just be dealing with dedicated PhysX cards to run Physics calculations for games, you may also have a dedicated AI card:

From Bluesnews:

Instinct Technology has collaborated with Dark Water Studios to create a movie showing how their middleware product Instinct Studio is able to use NVIDIA’s CUDA technology to offload AI from the CPU onto the GPU of the graphics card. The trailer shows GPU-controlled flocking behavior in DogFighter that allowed them to display a ridiculous (as in over 4000) number of aircraft on the screen at once, all controlled by a single CUDA-enabled graphics card. The clip is posted on the YouTube, and here’s word:

This is a video from a case study/tech our friends from Instinct Tech (www.instinct-tech.com) did for us. We wanted to know how easily a technology like CUDA could be used from inside Instinct Studio (the game engine were using for our WIP title DogFighter [www.dark-water-studios.com]) and if the additional horse power can be utilized for some game mechanics.

The demo shows 4096 bot planes handled solely on a single GPU parallel to game rendering. The bot planes use steering behaviours for flocking, navigation and obstacle avoidance. The planes are fully lit and rendered (with shadows). The demo runs with interactive frame rate on main stream CUDA enabled graphics cards. In comparison the same simulation without utilizing CUDA achieved a similar frame rate on a decent machine with only 512 planes in our tests. The steering computation for 512 planes requires about 260.000 neighbour queries while for 4096 planes this grows to a whopping 16 Million queries. The algorithm can be easily parallelized, explaining the advantage of technologies like CUDA for this kind of problem. Even if there is a potential to optimize the algorithm for CPU the clear benefit for us is a heavily reduced development time.