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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#101

Post by anthk »

dfox wrote: post #65
anthk wrote: post #38

RAD had an amazing software renderer on par on the Unreal one.

Pixomatic wasn't just on par with UE1's SW rasterizer it was somewhat explicitly designed to be the SW rasterizer for UE2. The thing was notable by the fact that it had feature parity with HW Direct3D implementations of the time and worked by dynamically compiling D3D shaders into x86 code (which had the interesting feature that it used ESP as general purpose register). IIRC the idea behing Intel's Larabee at least p…

I think the Havok engine ran on that on software mode too, at least for the first Max Payne. I remember forgetting to install NV drivers back in the day, and the game launched smoothly at 640x480 with no issues. Ok, it was uber-grainy, but still playable.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#102

Post by naikrovek »

anthk wrote: post #97
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…

>playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources Eh, a PS2 with a ~300mhz MIPS CPU is more than able to play VCD with MPEG1 encoded video. You must be young, because the PS2 is on par a Pentium MMX/Pentium 2 and for sure you could play MPEG videos back in the day.

If that's all it was doing while the video played, sure. That's not all they were doing while videos played. Often, videos were shown while assets were unloaded from RAM and others were loaded from disk.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#103

Post by anthk »

shmerl wrote: post #91
danbolt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation might cost more in developer time than simply licensing Bink. Bink's developers are also going to be more conscious of the technical limitations of a game console that you might be running into (eg: hard thread/socket/resource limits) compared to a more general…

> The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation might cost more in developer time than simply licensing Bink. This sounds like an artifact of the past. Today there aren't that many hardware platforms that free codecs don't already cover properly. And I expect with something like push by AOM this will becom…

That's true. Windows oriented developers don't realize libre codecs are everywhere, even under Windows and OSX. Ditto with graphic and text handling libraries, I am pretty sure Freetype or Harfbuzz exists on some way under Windows and OSX.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#104

Post by anthk »

naikrovek wrote: post #102
anthk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources Eh, a PS2 with a ~300mhz MIPS CPU is more than able to play VCD with MPEG1 encoded video. You must be young, because the PS2 is on par a Pentium MMX/Pentium 2 and for sure you could play MPEG videos back in the day.

If that's all it was doing while the video played, sure. That's not all they were doing while videos played. Often, videos were shown while assets were unloaded from RAM and others were loaded from disk.

That's nothing when the PS2 is able to play MPEG2 video (DVD's), something only a late Pentium2 could do, often with a hardware decoder or a good video card.

And the MPEG1 spec is compatible with MPEG2 based decoders on the PS2, so the effort on it would be almost null.

As I said, Gen-Zers understimate late 90's/early 00's hardware.

Also, the PS2 GPU was a data monster, refilling the VRAM like nothing. Ask the PCSX2 developers about that.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#105

Post by p1necone »

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…

The PS5 launched with only 667gb of usable disk space, asset compression has some use still.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#106

Post by pacificat0r »

shmerl wrote: post #92
azornathogron wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I don't work in the industry, but am an interested amateur) [Edit- I may have misunderstood your question, but I'll leave my reply anyway.] Here are some possible reasons you might use Bink instead of a free codec: - Bink video has been around for a long time as a product, even though the codec has been updated (probably multiple times, I don't know). There weren't always good-enough free codecs, and if you have pri…

> Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting. So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will…

Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games.

As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario.

Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads, ffmpeg isn't nicer either.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#107

Post by sudosysgen »

anthk wrote: post #100
sudosysgen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFMpeg and Gstreamer both run on both Nvidia Tegra hardware and AMD Jaguar/Bulldozer at 4K 60fps.

Gstreamer is more suited for filtering/FX and media overlays.

That's true, but on the Bulldozer/GCN system I had as well as the Jetson I played with it was still able to decode 4K 60fps video.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#108

Post by shmerl »

pacificat0r wrote: post #106
shmerl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting. So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will…

Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games. As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario. Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads,…

> Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games.

Well, that's exactly the point. It's been around for dark ages. Today things are different.

For new codecs like AV1 there are new and efficient decoders too and they are only getting better. It's not all limited to ffmpeg which is using external decoders anyway, it doesn't decode things itself.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#109

Post by pacificat0r »

shmerl wrote: post #108
pacificat0r wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games. As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario. Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads,…

> Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games. Well, that's exactly the point. It's been around for dark ages. Today things are different. For new codecs like AV1 there are new and efficient decoders too and they are only getting better. It's not all limited to ffmpeg which is using external decoders anyway, it doesn't decode things itself.

As I said, in games there's always a need for fast, platform agnostic (and super low overhead API that just works). And I mean truly platform agnostic, PS4, PS5, Switch, etc. Those are new platforms that may or may not have ports of whatever else is "available" and "fast".

Bink fits the bill today and has fit the bill since forever. I don't see any of the alternatives having similar performance characteristics, ease of integration or availability on platforms that are more or less closed and there's no indication of them being open in the future.

In adition to that the switch cost is quite high so any other alternative has to be good, and I haven't yet seen a contender.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#110

Post by shmerl »

pacificat0r wrote: post #109
shmerl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games. Well, that's exactly the point. It's been around for dark ages. Today things are different. For new codecs like AV1 there are new and efficient decoders too and they are only getting better. It's not all limited to ffmpeg which is using external decoders anyway, it doesn't decode things itself.

As I said, in games there's always a need for fast, platform agnostic (and super low overhead API that just works). And I mean truly platform agnostic, PS4, PS5, Switch, etc. Those are new platforms that may or may not have ports of whatever else is "available" and "fast". Bink fits the bill today and has fit the bill since forever. I don't see any of the alternatives having similar performance characteristics, ease…

Consoles held progress back for decades, but even they can't stop it. So I see Bink becoming obsolete, I don't really see any major arguments for it. Just because it fit the bill before doesn't say anything about the future.
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