Friday, June 28th 2024
AMD Designs Neural Block Compression Tech for Games: Smaller Downloads and Updates
AMD is developing a new technology that promises to significantly reduce the size on disk of games, as well as reduce the size of game patches and updates. Today's AAA games tend to be over a 100 GB in size, with game updates running into tens of gigabytes, with some of the major updates practically downloading the game all over again. Upcoming games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is reportedly over 300 GB in size, which pushes the game away from those with anything but Internet connections with hundreds of Mbps in speeds. Much of the bulk of the game is made up of visual assets—textures, sprites, and cutscene videos. A modern AAA title could have hundreds of thousands of individual game assets, and sometimes even redundant sets of textures for different image quality settings.
AMD's solution to this problem is the Neural Block Compression technology. The company will get into the nuts and bolts of the tech in its presentation at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (July 3-5), but we have a vague idea of what it could be. Modern games don't drape surfaces of a wireframe with a texture, but also additional layers, such as specular maps, normal maps, roughness maps, etc). AMD's idea is to "flatten" all these layers, including the base texture, into a single asset format, which the game engine could disaggregate into the individual layers using an AI neural network. This is not to be confused with mega-textures—something entirely different, which relies on a single large texture covering all objects in a scene. The idea here is to flatten the various data layers of individual textures and their maps, into a single asset type. In theory, this should yield significant file-size savings, even if it results in some additional compute cost on the client's end.
Source:
HotHardware
AMD's solution to this problem is the Neural Block Compression technology. The company will get into the nuts and bolts of the tech in its presentation at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (July 3-5), but we have a vague idea of what it could be. Modern games don't drape surfaces of a wireframe with a texture, but also additional layers, such as specular maps, normal maps, roughness maps, etc). AMD's idea is to "flatten" all these layers, including the base texture, into a single asset format, which the game engine could disaggregate into the individual layers using an AI neural network. This is not to be confused with mega-textures—something entirely different, which relies on a single large texture covering all objects in a scene. The idea here is to flatten the various data layers of individual textures and their maps, into a single asset type. In theory, this should yield significant file-size savings, even if it results in some additional compute cost on the client's end.
22 Comments on AMD Designs Neural Block Compression Tech for Games: Smaller Downloads and Updates
Years ago there is a FPS demo well under 100KB, presumably with mathematically described meshes and textures. This might ultimately be a fancier version of that with generative AI stapled on.It probably need not be synchronous. Unpack at install time for commonly-used assets and just-in-time generation for others, maybe.
Things that irk me in particular are cinematics that are clearly just in-engine footage encoded to 1080p video. If you're playing at 1440p or 4K ultra, or at higher framerate than the video, the cutscenes are lower resolution AND lower framerate - so they're jarringly worse than your regular gameplay all while taking up an absolute gobload of disk space as they pull you out of the immersive in-engine experience you were enjoying before the cutscene kicked in.
Patches that redownload the whole thing rather than just a delta patch are also stupid. If a 10GB file has changed, don't download the whole 10GB, download the 400Kb that's been updated from the original. Bit-level replication is ancient technology at this point so why aren't game devs using it?
I miss live-action cutscenes of old ages. I'm glad Alan Wake 2 brought them back. :)
Now we have unoptimized games enhanced with AI so that they run correctly with lower dev costs.
Tons of AAA games don't even come close to that and even the biggest ones tend to be around 150GB or even half that. COD is getting way out of control, if that game gets much bigger in the future you'll need a dedicated SSD just for it.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidias-neural-texture-compression-technology-should-alleviate-vram-concerns.308412/
Technically very different things.
hothardware.com/news/nvidia-neural-texture-compression
research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/neural_texture_compression/assets/ntc_medium_size.pdf
Maths behind it are insane, man :eek:
Something more concerning is how reconstruction techniques are being named as compression - both by nvidia and amd. They can be great and all but they're not compression, the neural network is generating new information, it can be very close to the original uncompressed data but it won't be the same thing. A better term would be neural network based reconstruction
DL sizes shouldn't be this big to begin with. They're packing 100GB+ of crap into half-baked releases, now they will have excuse to pack 120-150+ GB of crap into half-baked releases with no improvement in actual quality or more meaningful content, just rushed, bloated crap, because "muh kompreshun!1!!1!!!!!!"