Epic acquires RAD Game Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#51

Post by kevingadd » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

It seems weird to use specialized video decode hardware when videos are almost always played in a full-screen exclusive fashion. Like, other than loading, what is the CPU doing during those times?

Videos have been used frequently for all sorts of other stuff in games since the playstation, if not earlier. In StarCraft the portrait of your selected unit was a movie file (RAD smacker, I think? But I don't have a copy of starcraft lying around to double check).

Supergiant Games' titles since Bastion all use RAD's Bink codec to store offline renders of their character models (as movies) instead of traditional sprite sheets or realtime rendered 3d models, so they're playing back dozens of movies at all times.

As another reply mentioned, it's also standard at this point for loading screens to be movies.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#52

Post by incrudible » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

It seems weird to use specialized video decode hardware when videos are almost always played in a full-screen exclusive fashion. Like, other than loading, what is the CPU doing during those times?

To be clear, Kraken is for general compression, not video.

Of course you can do video decoding in software, that's what Bink is. It can do 4K60 on a PS4 CPU.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#53

Post by Impossible » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

It seems weird to use specialized video decode hardware when videos are almost always played in a full-screen exclusive fashion. Like, other than loading, what is the CPU doing during those times?

I worked on COD:AW and we used video in game often. The lead UI artist would have used it significantly more if performance was better. Might be an exception but it's not uncommon, I've worked on multiple titles with full 3D and video playback at the same time

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#54

Post by neurostimulant » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #44

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

It seems weird to use specialized video decode hardware when videos are almost always played in a full-screen exclusive fashion. Like, other than loading, what is the CPU doing during those times?

Aren’t bink videos can be rendered as textures? A lot of games use such effects on in-game objects (e.g. tv playing real videos).

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#55

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #28

scrollaway wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really hoping epic takes the opportunity to give Bink a more open license, to be honest. Much as I appreciate how advanced Bink was at the time, i don't know any dev that still use it given that av1 and such are just Good Enough.

Bink isn't the codec, though that's good too, it's the software stack. How do you render AV1 on a PS4 or a Nintendo Switch, synchronize it with the audio stream? No, seriously, tell me. GStreamer with its ridiculous threading architecture and lock-heavy approach? You think that's going to run on a console CPU? ffmpeg / libavcodec? Yes, we can hook that up, have it crank out YUV buffers and display those on the GPU, o…

SDL has always been the stack of reference when implementing your own engine, as far as I've seen in game dev. Now that is probably not the case for AAA games like cyberpunk etc, I don't follow as much tech there. But yeah, I've never seen gstreamer used for that. Curious if you can elaborate bout your experience especially wrt. the switch like you were mentioning downthread, I'm super curious.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#56

Post by megameter » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

While the codecs have been central to RAD nearly from the start(Miles was the first product, closely followed by Smacker), the talent pool they have is exceptional across many other categories relevant to Epic - so there is an element of aquihire here, even considering the IP. It's probably a good time to exit since the alternative would mean coming up with a sufficiently awesome next-gen thing again, and even with experienced hands, that can be a moonshot.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#57

Post by zamadatix » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #42

zamadatix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PS4 and Switch both have hardware decoders (though neither would be using AV1 in particular due to age). I'm not sure about how it works on PS4 but on Switch games just use NVDEC like a PC with Nvidia hardware would and the functionality is exposed in the SDK. You can use h.264, h.265, VP8, and VP9 (the hardware supports more but it's not exposed). When Bink was released and the PS2 and Gamecube were on the horizon t…

I can't go into more detail because these platforms do not have any public documentation, but this is not true, you cannot use NVDEC. And it doesn't cover audio or synchronization.

Without referencing non-public documentation https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-nvdec-emulation/

"The Switch uses NVDEC along with VIC (Video Image Composer) in the GPU for video decoding. Games are exposed to higher level APIs by Nintendo which abstract the configuration of these modules."

If you're using a custom engine which does not want to use these APIs you're of course free to do it yourself (and deal with how you're going to syncronize it and the higher resource utilization) but most major titles use the built in hardware decoder provided via the API.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#58

Post by megameter » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #22

What is the point of making custom codecs for Bink, instead of using state of the art free codecs?

It's a combination of patents, features, target devices, and marketing proposition. There are many devices with hardware decoders that work great for watching a TV show, but if you're using video for interactive assets as games do, you probably have latency targets to hit, you might want seek-through performance, you may want transparencies, and so on. And RAD has long had a lock on really supporting the platforms game devs are using, so if you use their stack instead of bodging together a video solution, you're saving time overall.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#59

Post by gman83 » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

If Epic wanted to make a video game streaming service like Stadia, the video compression knowledge these guys have could come in very handy I imagine. So maybe it's not just about Unreal Engine, but about making the Epic store in to a streaming service.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#60

Post by ratww » Thu, Jan 07, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #40

mappu wrote: post #33

The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort. So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Curr…

I heard that the main issue with decompressed assets was audio, not video (granted, video is image and audio so one is a strict superset of the other). One game - Titanfall or a CoD game, IIRC - had something like 20 GB of uncompressed audio in a 35GB installation footprint. Rationale was saving CPU cycles. Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore :\

That doesn't really compute. Audio decompression is pretty light on CPUs these days.

It takes about half a second in a single core to decompress a 4 min MP3 to WAV in my 2012 MB Air, including writing to disk. In a gaming machine it will be way less. If anything, the audio could be decompressed and cached on demand, when loading levels, or even during installation.

Also sound cards do not participate on the decompression process. It's been CPU from the start, baring rare exceptions. Sound cards just receive raw PCM. There used to be hardware codecs but they're not really common, especially in consumer/gamer-grade soundcards.