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Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

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Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#111

Post by fomine3 »

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.

Just curious, is there any reason MS/SIE console (AMD custom SoC) won't implement hardware RAD decoder? From what I read from this submission, their codec is good and used everywhere so it looks like it's better to have HW decoder.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#112

Post by midnightclubbed »

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.

PS2 had hardware to decompress DVD quality video with very low cpu overhead. Rad's bink video compression (at the time of the PS2) was slower and more dvd bandwidth heavy, only reason to use it was if you didn't want a separate set of video files for your PS2 game sku.

On the PC Bink was a great choice for FMV as it had a really clean API and 'just worked'.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#113

Post by klodolph »

p1necone wrote: post #105
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.

The PS5 has hardware-accelerated decompression, which is probably what you’d want to use when targeting PS5.

Mind you, it’s based on an algorithm that RAD devised…

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#114

Post by Rexxar »

person_of_color wrote: post #75
jo032 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers

What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?

Interesting job with other people they like is probably a good guess.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#115

Post by midnightclubbed »

Danieru wrote: post #85
tomc1985 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. If it were just video it'd seem like it would be cheaper to include an h.264 chip, they're a lot more common and you get the same thing

Encoding videos across consoles in h.264 is a pain and unreliable. I did it, and so I can see why a big budget title would use blink. Each console has its own odd and undocumented requirements for the encoding specification. Think 1079p at 29.99fps pm one console while vannila 1080p 30fps on another. Get it wrong and your video is blank with only a "failed to decode" in the logs.

Absolutely. Massaging video codec settings to exactly match the console hardware requirements and feeding video data in/out of each console's propriety video API is a royal PITA.

My feeling is that big budget games are prepared to jump through the hoops in order to wring the last drop of video quality (or add hours more 'content') but when timelines are short and engineers are thinly spread Bink is a great way to just get it done and move along.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#116

Post by midnightclubbed »

Of all the RAD offerings Telemetry is the most special. It lets you record millions of CPU profiling events (thousands per frame) with extremely low overhead, and then shows those events in a hierarchical timeline.

For game optimization it is completely unique and literally game changing. It will show you where your hotspots are, where your threads are starving out, which CPU core is running an event (and when it is thread-switched), where your random frame hitches are happening, how your cpu workload is being spread across your frame. You can seamlessly zoom from seeing the scheduling/tasks for 100 consecutive frames of a game down to what was happening in a 100us slice of a single frame.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#117

Post by bayindirh »

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 :\

> Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore...

I think better opamps and audio quality is always enough reason to have a separate sound card in your PC.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#118

Post by BatteryMountain »

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…

Another thing that changed from say 10 years ago, some games have better launchers and ways to configure them.

What I'm hoping to see at this front, since install sizes are bloating, that the installers/configuring becomes slightly more advanced.

When I install a game I want to be able to choose the following at install-time:

Texture Packs (main blobs that takes up a lot of space - why download 50GB if you need the 10GB version)

Language Packs

Voice/Audio Packs

Mode Packs (Single Player Campaigns, Multi player, maps)

This way you can take a game that currently cost say 80GB for everyone to average out 30GB to 50GB for most players. On the low end the same game needs to work at 10GB and at the high end can consume the whole 80GB for the person with hardware that can take it. Obviously for console players, they just want to play and get on with it and maybe wont enjoy the choices mentioned above, but PC and tweakers/benchmarkers/modders should enjoy it.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#119

Post by psykotic »

person_of_color wrote: post #75
jo032 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers

What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?

RAD always paid very well by gamedev standards. But that was never the main reason people worked there.

Some of the engineers are older but Fabian is in his thirties and last I checked his goatee wasn't greying.

Re: Epic acquires RAD Game Tools

#120

Post by [deleted] »

garaetjjte wrote: post #99
selectodude wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because pricing on stuff like that is negotiable and they don't want people to have a starting point.

Or less favorable take from Joel Spolsky: "Bad Idea #2: How Much Money Do You Have? Pricing." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... I too find those companies weird. They seem to have nice product, website boasts how nice it is, but: no publicly available documentation, evaluation SDK, no pricing, only thing that's there is sales@ address. And while their product might be good it isn't reall…

[deleted]
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