Game studios constantly strive to attain a balance between competing forces: technology and art, speed and quality, and the peaks and valleys of staffing needs throughout a project. With the pressures of launch day deadlines and high player expectations always looming, business success is dictated by one’s ability to deliver the best gaming experience while managing costs throughout a game’s entire lifecycle.
The cloud is radically altering the IT landscape for many businesses by supporting collaboration and driving cost savings across a huge variety of workloads and industries. Now, the cloud is ready to take on the enormous demands of game development. It is not only feasible but advantageous for game studios to leverage for their most resource-taxing projects the latest high-performance virtual workstations, access to secure data storage as well as a range of cloud services to help improve business agility and operations.
When migrating their applications to the cloud, studios need to ensure consistent application performance for artists and developers, so player experiences don’t diminish. AMD Radeon PRO GPUs deployed in the latest Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G4ad instances support the most demanding development engines, tools, and collaborative workflows entirely in the cloud.
G4ad instances come in different sizes to support the requirements of the many different roles within a development team. This enables a game development studio to finely tune its cloud development resources on a per-user basis to best match business needs and project budgets. Best of all, G4ad virtual workstations are available on-demand and in several regions to support contributors anywhere in the world.
G4ad virtual workstations for games developers are powered by AMD Radeon PRO V520 “Navi” GPUs and 2nd Gen AMD EPYC “Rome” CPUs. Both use the latest 7nm AMD RDNA and Zen 2 architectures, the same exclusive design technologies that drive next-generation console and PC experiences for gamers. G4ad instances provide GPU acceleration through APIs including OpenGL, DirectX, Vulcan, or OpenCL to power today’s development applications. High-performance HBM2 memory is on tap to provide a smooth user experience when handling even the largest models and datasets.
High-performance HBM2 memory is on tap to provide a smooth player experience when handling even the largest models and datasets. Hyper-efficient and high bandwidth PCI Express 4.0 interconnects ensure massive data throughput between GPU memory and VM storage to provide games developers with the responsive experience they expect from their workstations.
Rethinking the development pipeline
Games studios can expect to reap significant benefits by shifting development projects to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and services such as Amazon EC2 G4ad instances, including:
Fast, flexible and scalable
From the first concept to the final crunch, a studio’s needs change all the time. AWS can support any number of workstations required for the project size. And unlike physical workstations, AWS virtual workstations are always up to date and can simply be increased/decreased with demand peaks/lulls. Since all work is done in the cloud and only display information is passed to the user’s device, end users don’t require high-end, high-cost machines and can bring their own device if appropriate.
Secure data management
A studio’s data is its most precious asset. With G4ad, all compute functions are in the cloud, so no data needs to be transferred to end devices IT managers can provide or revoke access to data as needed.
Predictable costs
With virtual workstations, depreciation and hardware maintenance increasingly become things of the past. Instead of expensive outlays for server and workstation hardware, the cloud offers predictable monthly planning. Hardware maintenance is handled by AWS so your team can be productive at creating and developing fun and immersive games at all time.
Hire the best talent for every task
With the ability to accelerate 3D workflows from the cloud, games developers can hire the right staff and contractors for any job. Having on-premises staff and remote workers all working on the same platform enhances collaboration, project management, and pipeline efficiency.
Download free game development solution brief.
Ready to take a closer look to see if G4ad instances and AMD-powered virtual workstations are the right answer for your next AAA project? Download Moving Game Development to the Cloud to see how G4ad will work for your development pipeline.
Accelerate Game development with the cloud - listen to the podcasts series from Teradici
Teradici's biweekly podcast, with industry guests and experts from AMD and Amazon Web Services (AWS), describe how to fast track and simplify game development pipeline using the cloud. Each episode focuses on a key topic and helps to address the challenges that a game studio would face when thinking of moving into a hybrid or remote studio environment. To get more insights, listen to the podcasts now:
Ready to get started with EC2 G4ad instances? Click here Amazon EC2 G4 Instances — Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Additional links
- G4ad landing page: www.amd.com/G4ad
- G4ad landing page: Amazon EC2 G4 Instances — Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- G4ad pricing: G4ad.4xlarge instance of AWS-EC2 | Instance Pricing (instance-pricing.com)
- AMD G4ad announcement blog: AMD powered Amazon EC2 G4ad Delivers Cost-Effectiv... - AMD Community
- G4ad announcement blog: Coming Soon – Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances Featuring AMD GPUs for Graphics Workloads | AWS News Blog
- G4ad deep drive blog: Deep dive on the new Amazon EC2 G4ad instances | AWS Compute Blog
- G4ad support for Teradici blog: Teradici CAS now supports Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances
- NICE DCV support for G4ad blog: NICE DCV included with Latest GPU-enabled AMD-base... - AMD Community
George Watkins is a Product Marketing Manager for AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. 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.