AMD people are fanatics about AAA gaming experiences and making them available everywhere, for everyone. That’s why our CEO Lisa Su was seated front and center at the 2019 Game Developers Conference keynote when Google announced it had chosen to partner with AMD to design a high-performance custom GPU solution to support its Vulkan® and Linux®-based cloud gaming platform, building upon a close, long-term collaboration between the two companies.
This might not have been a surprise if you’ve been keeping watch over the recent, rapid developments in cloud gaming. AMD GPUs already helped impress demanding gamers by powering Assassin’s Creed®: Odyssey for players from the Cloud as part of Google’s Project Stream.
It goes without saying that every AAA game interaction is measured ultimately by performance. AMD already delivers the performance behind top PC and console gaming experiences. That deep gaming expertise combines perfectly with our unique datacenter-class GPU technologies to enable the future of cloud-gaming. AMD datacenter GPUs deliver the high-performance processing needed to minimize latency and maximize the game experience. But there’s more to cloud gaming than what happens on screen and at the controller.
How do we enable thousands, even millions, of simultaneous cloud gamers to push their gaming skills to the limit? AMD datacenter GPUs address critical, behind-the-scene datacenter requirements with purpose-built, proven technologies for security, manageability, and scalability. The industry’s first hardware-based GPU virtualization solution built on industry-standard SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) technology delivers fast, predictable performance with enhanced security features. HBM2 memory provides power savings in a space-saving footprint, as well as important features such as Error Correcting Code (EEC) protection to help ensure data integrity.
Our commitment to open source platforms, including support for Linux-based Vulkan drivers, offers developers confidence to deliver their games to multiple platforms. Many of today’s biggest games are already optimized for AMD GPUs and developers expect many of those decisions will carry over when running on the AMD datacenter GPUs that power cloud-gaming. AMD also provides developers with tools and enhancements needed to fine tune game experiences. These include:
- The AMD Linux driver includes an application tracing component that, together with the AMD Radeon™ GPU Profiler (RGP), provides access to detailed, low-level information about how workloads run on AMD GPUs. Identifying timing issues that might suggest potential optimizations, this capability can dramatically improve developers’ ability to create applications that deliver the best possible performance on AMD GPUs.
- RGP also allows game developers to visualize precisely how their application is utilizing the AMD GPU, including how graphics and compute thread groups occupy the GPU, enabling them to track event timing and optimize their games for the Stadia service/platform.
- RGP interoperates with the popular open-source RenderDoc graphics debugging tool to give developers deeper real-time insights into the rendering of each frame, which can significantly reduce the time required to debug and profile frames during the development process.
- RGP operates the same way in a virtualized environment as it does when running on a dedicated PC client, making it as easy for developers to optimize their applications for virtualized GPUs in large scale environments as they would for any other gaming platform.
If you’ve got your eye on the fast-approaching cloud-gaming future, you’ll want to check out the GDC keynote. And be sure to check back for more exciting cloud gaming news from AMD in the coming weeks and months.
Supporting Resources
- Learn more about AMD and cloud gaming solutions here
- Learn more about Radeon GPU Profiler here
- Learn more about RenderDoc here
- Discover AMD Open Software support on GPUOpen.com
- Learn more about AMD Radeon Software GDC19 updates here
- Become a fan of AMD on Facebook
- Follow AMD on Twitter
- Follow Radeon™ graphics on Twitter
Scott Jackson, Director Product Management, Datacenter GPU Business Unit
