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Discussing RDNA 3, Lovelace, Arrow Lake, PS5 Pro w/ Bryan Heemskerk (Patreon)

Published:
2023-08-02 01:11:26
Edited:
2023-08-02 17:48:42
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The next episode of Broken Silicon will see the return of the Art Director at Massive Damage Studios, Bryan Heemskerk.  For those who don't know, this veteran of the podcast is an exemplary person to ask about anything having to do with GPU Architectures, Game Development, and how future hardware is likely to function.  We plan to discuss:

RDNA 3 Performance 8 months after launch

Nvidia Lovelace

The types of deals devs would (or wouldn't) make with AMD and Nvidia

Arrow Lake removing Hyper-Threading

What "Rentable Units" likely mean for future games

Ratchet & Clank PC Performance

The state of Game Optimization

PlayStation 5 Pro Rumors

The Future of XBOX

AI competing with or Devs for jobs and/or enhancing Game Development

Whatever else you all ask us!

You have ~24 hours (Till Tomorrow Evening US Central Time), to submit below!  Be concise, respectful, and use good grammar to have your submission considered!

Previous Bryan Episode: https://youtu.be/nvjb8HPZbZU

Bryan's Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/bryanheemskerk

Comments

AI Generated Fish

Hi Tom and Bryan, a couple future looking questions for you. With Nvidia stagnating mid to low tier laptop performance this gen, how bad are the sub 4080 laptop GPUs going to look in the next 3-5 years? If someone were building a budget desktop setup, what would you say would be the minimum hardware spec today to get 1440p/120hz at decent quality for 3-5 years?

Jen-Hsun Huang, AI is not circular

Hello, Why do gamers not understand the sheer value that GPUs like the 3050 and 4060ti bring to entry level and entry level high refesh rate gaming?

SumRndmPenguin

Hi Tom and Bryan. What are your opinions on games being designed with upscaling "required"? Remnant 2 has been getting some flack for this recently, but I predict that more developers are going to take this approach in the future.

FloridaMan

Hi Tom and Bryan, AMD seems to have dropped the ball on day 1 drivers for Ratchet and Clank. Ray tracing was not available for AMD GPUs, and AMD showed poorer rasterized performance compared to other titles against Nvidia. How early in game development does AMD typically get involved with driver support vs Nvidia? In Rachet and Clank's case, do you think AMD were low on driver personnel, or did they just start on driver support too late?

FloridaMan

Do you feel that CPUs improvements are keeping up with game physics complexity and ray tracing? What performance would you as a game developer want to see in Zen 5 / Arrow Lake?

Chris

As someone who switched to Radeon GPUs after having a 3060 do y'all think Nvidia will do better with the 5000 series cards and make a comeback or do yall think Radeon will keep the lead with prices and price to performance cards?

CompressedAIBlocks

Hello Tom and Bryan. I was wondering how do you guys feel about the removal of SMT in Arrow Lake? How will this ultimately effect game development? Will it make any difference for games within a reasonable time frame before being irrelevant (3 years)?

CompressedAIBlocks

Bryan just wondering how you feel about this generation of GPUs. I myself find Lovelace overpriced and the VRAM on most of the line up is a joke. On the AMD side I found RDNA 3 to be slightly under what I was expecting. It has been a boring generation for me to watch. What do you want from next /next next generation of GPUs for gaming?

Valko Milev

How the supper conductor LK99(if it is real) may shape the chip industry ?

Xavbeat03

Greetings Tom and Bryan, with Rentable Units do you think the Game industry will struggle to adapt their current systems to this new technology, or will this just be something that the OS will deal with? I'm curious about the difficulties of switching to a new 'thread' paradigm.

KingHarkinian

How is your pixel art so good? No really, how is it this good?

Gach

Hi Tom and Bryan. Current GPUs have large last level caches. Do developers have to do much to take advantage of these, or do they do their job well without extra attention?

Gach

The 4060 Ti 16 GB has been highly criticized for pricing. If price wasn't a factor and all else being equal, would you rather have 16 GB on a 128 bit bus, or 12 GB on a 192 bit bus.

SaltyInternetPirate

Hi, Bryan. Hollywood is currently struggling with writers and actors striking, but how is the gaming industry affected by it? As 3D and VFX artists are now overabundant and with no union of their own, they appear to be the most exploited, always working crunch time. Is there hope the artists and programmers will unionize as well?

Swiggles

Hey Bryan and Tom! how much "optimization" is actually done for a architecture or a specific series of cards. Is it mainly moving values around to make the game easier to run on any similarly capable cards or is it more understanding what these cards do best and changing the math or programing style.

Gus

Hi Tom and Bryan, The handheld pc gaming market has grown a lot in recent years. How are game devs looking at the handheld pc gaming market? Do game devs put more effort into optimizing for smaller screensize, low device storage and proton (linux translation layer) compatiblity? What do you think about the Steam Deck vs the Rog Ally?

Gus

Hi Tom and Bryan, What do you think about games designed to a performance target with upscaling techniques enabled? For instance a game that would not be able to hit 4K60 on high end hardware with the native resolution but only with DLSS/FSR enabled.

Cleansweep

Hey Tom and Bryan, In the latest Die Shrink, Tom noted that GPU manufacturers were going to struggle with finding ways to make people buy high end GPUs once cards start can do 4K/120+Hz at the $350 to $400 range, because it'd be "good enough" for most people. He also observed that AMD and Nvidia have stagnated performance at 1080p at the low end as well. What do you think is the best way for the GPU manufacturers to recalibrate how they do pricing and segmentation? Index everything to the resolution and feature sets of TVs in the $300-400 range? Make the performance target of their lowest end card 2x times the performance and VRAM of their low end card from 3-5 years prior?

Steven M

Hi Tom and Bryan! When can we expect future games to require a ray tracing GPU and end rasterized lighting? Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition was spectacular as all the lighting was real-time ray traced global illumination. The 4A devs said it really reduce the amount of time for lighting vs having to manually place lighting probes or spotlights.

KingHarkinian

Hello, what do you think will be the highest priority growth spaces in the next 5 years for GPUs? What are the most sought after things for artists and game devs right now?

KingHarkinian

How will AI art be used by pros? Will it be mostly enhancements with the artist doing the drawing, then they'll request colouring/detailing/adding effects to an AI, or straight up feed an AI with an art style and get it pumping out fully constructed assets?

AI Generated Fish

Hi Tom and Bryan, I work in data science so it comes up for us but I know that AI is a hot topic in game development. For you, what are some things you think AI would really help with in development and some areas where you think it is going to be a waste of time/effort?

KingHarkinian

Any chance of seeing AI encouraging/rekindling pixel art?

Dark Side of the Force

Hi Tom and Bryan! Currently everyone is hot on the AI art trend, though do you think could we see a degradation in future models as the well has been poisoned by AI art itself? I recall the problem with Hcaptcha generating meaningless/ imaginary object and distorted image, would it be a problem in the future? And finally, do you think there should be strong separation between AI art and Human art in the future to avoid this?

Cleansweep

What kinds of pitches for AI game dev/art tools have you (Bryan) been getting? Don't need to name names if you don't want to, but is the focus on doing more with less people and/or making hard tasks easier? I saw a news story somewhere about Adobe's own developers being concerned that integrating AI into their creative suite would actually kill like 300K+ positions or something, which is definitely a concern with generative AI tools.

10GHz Netburst

Do you think there is a risk that smaller devs get left behind if accelerators become a major part of pushing forward the performance of games on PC? I would imagine switching to new computing "paradigms" would be an expensive undertaking in terms of the cost to learn and understand how to use them.

Chris Rijk

Let's say that you wanted a GPU that could play almost all games coming out in the next 5 years at 4K with max settings - how much VRAM do you think would be required to avoid stuttering due to running low on VRAM?

Chris Rijk

Intel has gone from only big cores to a mixture of sizes and will be making further changes in future according to Tom’s leaks. Do you think this could cause developers problems from an optimisation perspective or is it already causing problems? Would it be more of an issue if the CPU on consoles were changing in a similar manner?

Chris Rijk

There seems to be a lot of research going into advanced global illumination techniques, such as Lumen in Unreal. Bryan, do you think this will become common in new games soon? Do you have any experience with using global illumination in games? Would you expect it to have a significant impact on CPU or GPU usage? Might this change in future?

Samuel Park

As of now, we see a lot of online art communities pushing back on the advancement of AI art. Most artists do not like their art being used for training without permission and they are trying to use various tools to prevent it from being used for that purpose. However, to me this is similar to the plight of anti-cheat vs cheaters. The tools that work to stop AI art are going to be playing catchup to the models that will quickly be trained to surpass such hurdles. Do you think online art communities have any chance at stopping AI art or are they SOL and will have to accept the fact that any digital art posted online will be used for training models?

10GHz Netburst

Which direction do you think we should go with resolution and FPS? Currently a lot of games tend to cap out around 150-200 FPS on modern CPUs and midrange GPUs can push close to those frame rates at 1440p. Do you think the midrange should do 4k and the high end even higher than that, or do you think games should try to deliver higher frame rates?

Dave Scholze

Hey Bryan! Hey Tom! Many new releases have been lacking as of late, especially for Unreal Engine games, due to the game-logic almost exclusively running on the game-thread. As a developer myself it's extremely tricky to handle all logic and spread tasks over multiple threads trying to read/write data from/to a certain address in memory. Can you think of a future where all memory, especially L1, L2, L3 etc. is shared between all cores so that we won't have to bother with scheduling issues and race conditions any longer? Optimizing a game for many cores is extremely hard, so this might be a solution. Am I mistaken? Could this be a solution? Are there too many latency issues? Or is what I am saying complete jibberish? Cause I'm fairly new to multi threading in UE5. :D

Deadeyes

Hi Tim and Brains. I don't remember people pitching fits over things like dynamic resolution scaling, checkerboarding, or the myriad of other tricks devs have used over the years to improve performance. To me modern upscalers like DLSS are just a better version of those tricks and I don't see what the big deal is for devs to lean on them sometimes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the kind of deep optimizations needed to get something like Remnant 2 to a state where it doesn't lean on upscaling would take a huge amount of time and therefore also money. Given that most games have a deadline and a budget to worry about, I'm guessing that time and money would have to be pulled from other things like bug fixes, polish, or God forbid, actually finishing content. People keep calling the devs lazy, but to me it just looks like they perhaps were a bit too ambitious with pushing new tech with UE5 and are now having to choose their priorities as it comes time to ship. Thoughts?

Prior is the theme 999

Hi Tom and Brian, XTX owner here. Now that the issues of vram have been widely accepted instead of being pushed off as poor optimization. How much longer until 8gb cards aren’t even given the light of day. I know we accept that 8 should be the absolute bottom floor going forwards, but with consoles having double that do you see developers even bothering in a year or two making the effort to get their games running well on them without their vision impacted?

Prior is the theme 999

Brian, as a developer. How many developers are actually signing binding contracts to one gpu manufacture, telling them what they can or can’t add. Is it even worth it from a developers standpoint to enter such a contract? Also I’m an XTX owner.

Athena Azuraea

I highly doubt all memory is going to be shared with all cores unless there is a revolution in technology. The more cores that share cache, the high the latency, The more cores that share cache, the bigger it needs to be. The bigger it is, the higher latency. We use several layers of cache to reduce the average latency for memory accesses. If all caches were to be combined, performance would drop sharply across the board. It also wouldn't remove race conditions or need for synchronization because we still have several cores executing simultaneously.

Eduard

Hi Tom and Brian, do you guys think upscaling will make 4k or even 8k go mainstream?