The Game Developers Conference (GDC), held in San Francisco, California, is one of the biggest professional developer events of the year. Game developers come from across the globe to learn, solve, and shape the future of the industry with their peers and partners.
Each year at GDC, AMD holds a variety of comprehensive and informative sessions where developers can learn about the latest news, updates, and research on all the tools and technologies available on GPUOpen, the AMD website for developers.
This year, AMD presented the latest updates to AMD FidelityFX™, the past, present, and future of AMD upscaling technology, the latest updates to the AMD Radeon™ Developer Tool Suite, and a lot more, all detailed in this blog. Along with these updates, AMD also worked closely with key partners presenting at GDC, such as Epic Games to help showcase some of their latest developments, which you can learn more about below.
If you couldn’t make it to GDC or if you are not a developer but still looking to understand more about what was presented, you can read on to learn about everything AMD talked about and watch videos from most of the sessions. The slide decks from each session are also available on GPUOpen.
Epic Games “State of Unreal” MetaHuman Animator demo powered by Ryzen and Radeon
At this year’s event, AMD didn’t just hold all its GDC developer sessions with all the exciting announcements made at them, but also worked with some of its key partners to showcase some of the amazing technologies available for game developers and content creators. As part of the Epic Games “State of Unreal” GDC presentation that took place on Wednesday, March 22, AMD Ryzen™ and Radeon™ technology powered a groundbreaking demo of Epic’s newly revealed MetaHuman Animator, which reproduces any facial performance as high-fidelity animation on MetaHuman characters using an iPhone or stereo helmet-mounted camera (HMC).
If you’re not familiar with this, MetaHuman is a framework for creating high-fidelity photorealistic digital humans for use in games and more, and MetaHuman Animator uses performance capture of a real actor to animate MetaHumans. The demo showcased the latest update to the MetaHuman creation workflow live on stage at the event, where the facial performance of actor Melina Juergens (Senua from the game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and the upcoming Senua's Saga: Hellblade II) was captured live using Epic’s Live Link Face app for Unreal Engine on iOS.
The performance capture was taken using the depth-sensing camera of the iPhone, so there was no need for any kind of special facial markers to help track the actor’s expressions, and then processed in real-time and applied to a photorealistic MetaHuman digital model in Unreal Engine 5. This technology empowers content creators to easily add performance capture into their content without having to invest in expensive and complex performance capture software and hardware, making this much more accessible for a broad range of developers.
In the live stage demo an AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processor helped parallelize the tracking of key landmarks like eyes, brows, and jaws during the performance capture. The demo system also used two AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX graphics cards, with the advanced AMD RDNA™ 3 architecture enabling simultaneous acceleration of the machine learning (ML) models used to calculate the temporal flow when applying the performance capture to the MetaHuman digital model. You can learn more about MetaHuman Animator and when it will be available in Epic's blog.
Temporal Upscaling Past, Present, and Future
One of the key AMD presentations at GDC this year was about AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technologies (1), presented by AMD Developer Technology Engineer Stephan Hodes. AMD FSR technology is a cutting-edge open-source upscaling technology that helps boost framerates in supported games and helps deliver high-quality, high-resolution gaming experiences.
The presentation covered the past, present, and future of FSR technology for developers, with a focus on the latest version of the technology, FSR 2.2 that was released on GPUOpen this past February. Stephan opened with describing one of the key motivators for developers to use upscaling technologies in their games -- it’s so that more time can be spent on the quality of the pixels in a game, instead of the quantity of pixels, especially if higher-resolution detail can be reconstructed using upscaling.
Stephan continued to go over AMD FSR 2 temporal upscaling technology in detail, starting with the overall goals of FSR 2, which are delivering high upscaling quality, an overall performance gain in supported games, and an easy integration for developers that works on a wide range of hardware.
He also went over some of the biggest challenges of temporal upscaling, which are all the different corner cases that developers must deal with to generate good quality results, such as translucent objects, reflections, thin features, and more. The presentation detailed some of the features and techniques available in FSR 2.2 to help developers overcome these challenges, such as using a Depth Clip, color clamping, thin feature locking, and using Reactive and TextureAndComposition masks.
Introducing AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 to Developers
In addition to covering the currently available AMD upscaling technologies, the presentation provided developers with an early introduction to AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3). First announced at the AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 series graphics card launch in November 2022, FSR 3 is the upcoming next generation of AMD upscaling technology and is currently still in development.
FSR 3 combines the super resolution upscaling technology of FSR 2, decades of AMD R&D and innovation, and new AMD Fluid Motion Frames interpolation technology to help deliver up to a 2x framerate boost in supported games (2). The AMD Fluid Motion Frames technology of FSR 3 will benefit from the synergies of temporal upscaling and interpolation, leveraging both motion vectors and AMD Fluid Motion technology to produce high quality interpolated frames.
In the diagram above from the presentation, you can see the different rendering paths of native rendering, FSR 2 with just upscaling, and FSR 3 with upscaling and interpolation -- to show how the rendering pipeline will change for developers when using FSR 3.
Along with the 2x framerate boost, there are three other key pillars of FSR 3 highlighted in the presentation:
- Latency reduction will be a key focus in the ongoing development of FSR 3 to provide gamers with both high framerates and the lowest latency possible.
- FSR 3 is expected to be easy to implement for developers, with existing integrations of FSR 2 being the easiest to transition to FSR 3.
- FSR 3 will be available to developers under an open-source MIT license to provide optimal integration flexibility.
You can download the slides of this presentation on GPUOpen for more details on everything that was presented. We will have more to share about FSR 3 for both developers and gamers as we get closer to its availability later in 2023.
Introducing the AMD FidelityFX SDK
Another AMD presentation at GDC 2023 was The FidelityFX™ SDK, presented by AMD Principal Member of Technical Staff Jason Lacroix. AMD FidelityFX™ is an open-source image quality toolkit of multiple effects and technologies, including AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution.
The effects are all available on GPUOpen and have been trusted and adopted by developers into many different games – in over 250. However, up until now each AMD FidelityFX technology was available as a separate solution, which could make it more complex and time consuming to add multiple AMD FidelityFX effects to a game.
To resolve this, the presentation announced the new AMD FidelityFX™ SDK. It will have all the great AMD FidelityFX technologies developers know and love in one place. In addition to all the current technologies, the SDK will also add some new technologies (covered in the section below), giving developers the tools they need to create world-class games.
Jason covered some of the main improvements the AMD FidelityFX SDK brings to developers, including a more consistent user experience, clean architecture, an easy-to-use API, high-quality documentation, and easier integration. Because the AMD FidelityFX SDK has a modular architecture, developers can just take the components they need for their game and effortlessly bolt them together.
The AMD FidelityFX SDK is a top-quality graphics middleware solution from AMD, and, of course, the full source code of everything in the SDK will still be available on GitHub under a genuine open-source MIT license -- with developers being free to use the SDK however they like. The AMD FidelityFX SDK is expected to be available on GPUOpen in Q2 2023.
New AMD FidelityFX Effects
Along with the AMD FidelityFX SDK, we are also introducing three new AMD FidelityFX effects, all based around “camera” effects that are commonly used in games.
The first is AMD FidelityFX™ Depth of Field, which helps developers add fast physically correct DoF to their games. The second is AMD FidelityFX™ Lens, which can be used to add various lens effects such as film grain and vignette. And the third is AMD FidelityFX™ Blur, which includes highly optimized blur kernels.
On top of these new effects, our Hybrid Ray Tracing samples, designed to help developers implement combined rasterized and ray-traced effects into their games to achieve quality results at optimal performance, will become part of the AMD FidelityFX SDK when it is released.
AMD FidelityFX™ Hybrid Reflections combines stochastic screen space reflections (SSSR) with ray tracing to create high-quality reflections. AMD FidelityFX™ Hybrid Shadows combines rasterized shadow maps and ray traced shadows to create high-quality and high-performance shadows.
The last new technology is AMD FidelityFX™ Brixelizer, an upcoming technology that will be added to the SDK in the future that is detailed later in this blog. All these technologies are expected to be available in the AMD FidelityFX SDK when it is released on GPUOpen in Q2 2023.
Optimizing Game Performance with the AMD Radeon Developer Tool Suite
The AMD Radeon™ Developer Tool Suite (RDTS) empowers game developers to achieve optimal DirectX® 12 and Vulkan® performance on AMD GPUs. At this year’s GDC, AMD Principal Member of Technical Staff Chris Hesik and Senior Software Development Engineer Can Alper showed how these specialized tools allow developers to inspect low-level GPU performance, visualize detailed GPU memory allocations, profile ray tracing pipelines, analyze acceleration structures, and statically analyze shader bottlenecks.
The RDTS includes the five applications: Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP), Radeon Raytracing Analyzer (RRA), Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV), Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA), and Radeon Developer Panel (RDP). In the presentation an overview of each application was given, along with information about both the latest and upcoming updates to them, which include:
- All applications: AMD RDNA™ 3 architecture support.
- RGP 1.14: HIP support, OpenCL/HIP instruction timing, and ExecuteIndirect and ray tracing support.
- RRA 1.1: Open-source code, rebraiding, triangle splitting, instance masks, and counter histogram.
- RMV 1.5: Keyboard shortcuts added and ray tracing support.
- RGA 2.7: DirectX® 11 offline mode, VGPR Pressure UI.
- RDP 2.8: Workflow UI improvements, system information.
The talk also covered some of the latest collaborations between AMD and external tool developers as part of the AMD commitment to the game development community. AMD worked with Microsoft® to ensure support for the latest updates to PIX, its performance tuning and debugging tool for DirectX® 12 games.
AMD also collaborated with the developer of Renderdoc to support capture of DirectX® Raytracing (DXR) applications, support for AMD RDNA™ 3 architecture graphics card GPA counter support, and interop with the Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) tool.
Lastly, work was done with LunarG to add support for DirectX® 12 and DXR to its GFXReconstruct application. You can learn more about the RDTS on GPUOpen.
Real-time Sparse Distance Fields for Games
This presentation by AMD Member of Technical Staff Lou Kramer introduced a novel method for developers to efficiently generate sparse distance fields (SDFs) in real-time.
SDFs are a way to represent scene geometry so that it can then be traversed to accomplish a range of effects. Examples of modern graphics algorithms enabled by such representations include Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion.
In the same session, a preview of an upcoming AMD FidelityFX effect was introduced: AMD FidelityFX™ Brixelizer. This technology can allow the real-time conversion of dynamic geometry into hierarchical “bricks” akin to a voxel representation. Such representation of scene data can allow a range of fast graphics methods to be implemented such as real-time Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, volumetric effects, and more.
Two-level Radiance Caching for Fast and Scalable Real-Time Dynamic Global Illumination in Games
At this presentation, part of GDC’s Advanced Graphics Summit that took place on Monday, AMD Senior Graphics Programmer Guillaume Boisse talked about his research work as part of the AMD ARR (Advanced Rendering Research) team into Real-time Global Illumination (GI).
Real-time GI is key to enabling dynamic and believable game worlds. GPU-accelerated ray tracing makes this possible; however, framerate and resolution requirements impose practical limits on current graphics hardware. Existing solutions, such as probe-based techniques, can suffer from reduced details and slow response times to lighting changes, and reservoir-based resampling techniques capture higher detail but typically suffer from poorer performance and increased noise.
The practical solution presented by Guillaume aims to make the most of every sample by caching the estimated radiance into a cache hierarchy used for both sampling and filtering. This approach can allow for highly performant, high-quality, and dynamic GI that can be easily integrated into existing real-time rendering pipelines. A preview of the solution in action is shown in the video above.
A video of the full Advanced Graphics Summit presentation will be available to watch on the GDC Vault after the event. For the more technically minded, you can also read the published research paper on this topic on our Advanced Rendering Research page, where you can also find other graphics technology research.
AMD Ryzen Processor Software Optimization
AMD Principal Member of Technical Staff Ken Mitchell and Senior Member of Technical Staff John Hartwig used this session to dive into instruction sets, cache hierarchies, resource sharing, and simultaneous multithreading of the latest AMD Ryzen™ processors. They provided insight into valuable code optimization opportunities and lessons learned thanks to AMD Game Engineering’s experiences working with AAA game developers.
Attendees of this talk learned about the micro-architecture of modern AMD CPUs, followed by optimizations, frequent issues, and benchmarking best practices to make their games run faster, build quicker, and maximize their end-user hardware. You can review the comprehensive AMD Ryzen™ Performance Guide on GPUOpen.
Microsoft DirectStorage: Optimizing Load-Time and Streaming
The era of rotational storage technology in gaming systems is winding down, and a golden age of extremely fast storage technologies is heating up. In this presentation about Microsoft® DirectStorage, AMD Senior Member of Technical Staff David Ziman went over how to integrate it into games to extract optimal load time and streaming performance.
He also discussed why a new API is needed, the changes required to code asset pipelines, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid. A demonstration was also presented to highlight the load time, streaming performance, frame rate, and player experience difference between DirectStorage and standard asset loading. You can learn more about AMD support for DirectStorage on GPUOpen.
Get the Latest News About GPUOpen Technologies
For Developers: Stay tuned to the GPUOpen news page and the GPUOpen Twitter channel for the latest information.
For Gamers: Check out the AMD Community gaming blogs, the AMD Red Team Community, and AMD Radeon™ social media channels on Twitter and Facebook.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AMD GDC PRESENTATIONS
LEARN MORE ABOUT FSR FOR DEVELOPERS
LEARN MORE ABOUT AMD FIDELITYFX FOR DEVELOPERS
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE RADEON DEVELOPER TOOL SUITE
Alexander Blake-Davies is a Senior Software Product Marketing Specialist for Radeon™ Software for Developers at AMD.
DISCLAIMERS AND FOOTNOTES
Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-98
- AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) versions 1 and 2 are available on select games which require game developer integration and is supported on select AMD products. AMD does not provide technical or warranty support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution enablement on other vendors' graphics cards. See https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/fidelityfx-super-resolution for additional information. GD-187
- Testing conducted by AMD performance labs as of November 2022, on a test system configured with a Ryzen 7950X CPU, AM5 motherboard, 32GB DDR5, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU, Windows 11 Pro, using AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.40.00.24 with AMD Smart Access Memory technology enabled with a pre-release version of FSR 3 with AMD Fluid Motion Frames enabled vs. a similarly configured system with FRS 2 in “Quality” mode enabled, both running the Unreal Engine 5 City Sample application. System manufacturers may vary configurations, yielding different results. Performance may vary. RX-835
ATTRIBUTIONS
Additional developer and game attributions: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/game-attributions
© 2023 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, FidelityFX, Radeon, RDNA, Ryzen, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft and DirectX are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Unreal and its logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Epic Games, Inc. in the US and elsewhere. Vulkan is a registered trademark of Khronos Group Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.