Stretching the Boundaries of Extreme
From the retro archives of gaming history, a popular Nintendo title, Bionic Commando*, has been resurrected in richly detailed, 3-D glory by GRIN, a Swedish development firm, and showcased on a multi-core gaming machine monster, Skulltrail. More formally known as the Intel® Dual Socket Extreme Desktop platform, Skulltrail is an eight-core system featuring two four-core Intel® Core™2 Extreme processors. This is the configuration that showcased the pre-release version of Bionic Commando at the 2008 Game Developers Conference (GDC) to an enthusiastic audience.
The extra processing muscle delivers greater detail, better physics, and exceptional effects, or as Intel applications engineer Orion Granatir noted, "Basically, it allows them to turn the dial all the way up on the game." Turning up the dial—always a worthy endeavor—is something best accomplished through a well-calibrated blend of hardware and software. Parallelization was integral to the game development. "The nice thing about this title," Granatir said, "is that it takes advantage of multiple cores, so as we start getting these machines out there with more and more cores, eight cores, we're actually seeing titles that take advantage of it. Intel can help developers on multi-core in a number of ways. One of our main goals, through online resources, training sessions, and university courses, is to show developers how they can do multi-core, how they can design multi-core techniques into their games. There were a lot of titles early on where they were just trying to patch in multi-core with Intel, just saying, this is the future. Now we're doing sessions with companies, we're teaching them, we're doing literature, showing them how they can start taking advantage of our multi-core from the ground up.
David Potages, a Senior Engine Architect at GRIN, was heavily involved in threading Bionic Commando. "I have been at GRIN for three years," Potages said. "I'm working with the engine, improving the way it works. Threading the renderer is the first thing to do and it takes some time. Because it is quite tricky, it is really important to start very early. With eight cores we're getting better physics and effects, as you can see, like explosions, like effects with particles. I used Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer. You get pretty good interaction with your engine, as well." GRIN was also working with Intel on GRAW2, taking advantage of multi-core to enhance multi-player interactivity and responsiveness.
Messing with a Classic
Bionic Commando, the Nintendo classic released in 1988, equipped the hero with a useful grappling hook for swinging through the 2-D, side-scrolling game space. Though the latest iteration, published by Capcom, takes place in a far more interesting 3-D environment, the grappling hook is back with additional capabilities. Not only is the mechanical appendage handy for swinging across menacing abysses, but the bionically modified agent, Nathan Spencer, can use it to toss heavy objects around, traverse vertical inclines, and dissuade opponents from getting too close. Agent Spencer has an attitude in this new release. Having been framed for a number of crimes, he has been sentenced for execution when a mammoth explosion turns the city into rubble and Spencer is freed by his captors to help out the government in the post-apocalyptic world. With the terrain in ruins and the city's air defense grid now in the control of a massive terrorist force whose goal remains unclear, the FSA have only one option left: a behind-the-lines assault; the perfect job for a Bionic Commando. GRIN kept enough of the flavor of the game to make it recognizable to those who may have played the original, but the current 3-D renderings are a vast improvement over the earlier 2-D artwork. It's a richly detailed world of towering buildings, suspended roadways and monorails, deep canyons, and sheer rock faces, where every environment is scalable using swinging, scaling, climbing, and wall-walking techniques. Moving all of these pixels, textures, models, and shadows around a complicated, rubble-strewn world takes massive amounts of processing power. The game certainly doesn't require an eight-core system for a satisfying experience, but it knows how to use those cores when available and the result is a visual delight to game aficionados.
When it comes to delivering innovation to the ultimate enthusiast, our new 8-core desktop platform is a winner. The groundbreaking Intel® desktop board D5400XS enables the flexibility to pair a variety of quad graphics solutions with two of our fastest desktop processors. The result is stunning PC performance.
- Jeff McCrea, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Intel's Digital Home Group
Tuning, More Tuning, and Optimization
The development team at GRIN focused their optimization efforts for the game on platforms powered by Intel® Core™ microarchitecture, tailoring the code to take maximum advantage of the available cores in a system as well as the presence of features, such as Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 and 4.1. "We also think that Direct X* 10 support is important and that it requires some optimizations," Potages said. "The good thing is that DX and drivers are also starting to use the available cores in an efficient way. Our main objective with the game engine was to give the player a good frame rate, even in high workload circumstances," Potages continued. "I think we all hate it when you get a huge drop in the frames per second (FPS) during intense action scenes because of the number of enemies driven by artificial intelligence. So the natural way to keep the FPS rate high is to ensure we take advantage of all the cores. This is definitely not an easy task and requires a lot of re-factoring when working on an existing game engine. During development, we also wanted to fully support DX10 and its new features.
GRIN took advantage of support from Intel to craft the latest version of Bionic Commando, working to target the hardware platforms that would be in the market at the projected time for the software release. "The support from Intel is definitely excellent," Potages said. "We received some development systems and tools to experiment and benchmark our new features, which is extremely important when you try to develop for next-generation hardware. Game development takes a long time and if you want to fully support hardware that will be out when your game will be released, you need this kind of support very early on."
"Another thing we really appreciate with Intel," Potages added, "is the constant dialogue we have with them. This includes advice and best practices, but they also analyze and benchmark our engine; it is very useful to have comments from very experienced developers that know the hardware much better than most of game developers!"
Among the development tools put into play, Intel VTune Performance Analyzer took center stage, but the GRIN team also took advantage of two threading analysis tools: Intel® Thread Checker and Intel® Thread Profiler. Much of the code optimization took place on Intel-based development systems. GRIN used a wide range of configurations to ensure solid platform support and optimized code that worked well for all of them.
"When it comes to benchmarking and optimization," Potages said, "VTune is definitely the most useful tool we have. We were able to pinpoint several design issues (for instance, we reduced the data flow and redesigned the engine in some areas that were causing far too many cache misses), but we also optimized very specific areas of the code by examining how different implementations behaved. Also, Thread Checker found several possible data races that would have been extremely hard to track otherwise, so this was a very nice time saver." Potages commented that game developers want to minimize the time spent debugging, implementing tools, benchmarking, and optimizing, in order to focus on new features. It's difficult to create custom tools from the ground up, so using existing applications saves both tool development time and money. The polish and refinement of Intel VTune Performance Analyzer comes from a long history in which developer feedback has helped improve each successive release. Isolating bugs and design issues early in the development process offers big advantages when scrambling to complete a complex game on schedule.
The performance benefits of all of the tuning and optimization work were noteworthy. As Potages said, "Basically we managed to get to a point where the bottleneck on quad-core machines is the GPU; we're now able to add features such as additional effects that are only enabled when you get such architectures. But, we didn't forget dual-cores. The speed increase is big, and we keep optimizing it. For instance, the benchmarks we did for Intel's presentation at GDC 2008, Optimizing DirectX on Multi-core Architectures, showed a 1.76x FPS scale-up between one and two cores.
Take It to the Limits: Skulltrail
Extreme gaming offers a trial-by fire test bed for the most advanced hardware, and with that in mind, Intel's latest irrepressible gaming machine, Skulltrail, enters the fray like a monster truck rolling over the bleacher barriers and every other obstacle to enter the stadium. The Skulltrail platform includes the first desktop board from Intel with dual processor sockets: the Intel® Desktop Board D5400XS. Fill those sockets with a pair of Intel Core 2 Extreme processors QX9775 and you have full-tilt boogie eight-core processing, as well as support for up to four PCI Express graphics cards (both NVIDIA SLI™ Technology and ATI CrossFireX™ Technology components can be used).
The platform also handles up to 8 GB FBE DIMM 800 memory and supports Dolby® Home Theater 7.1-channel audio. To keep the on-screen action flowing smoothly, the Skulltrail data throughput benefits from a 3.2 GHz clock, up to 12 MB of cache, and a 1600 MHz Front Side Bus.
The gaming potential is not only hot, but dedicated gamers who rely on overclocking to push the processor performance have found a friend in Blastflow, a subsidiary of the British boutique PC manufacturer Vadim Computers. The Blastflow Tidal Skulltrail SB Block brings watercooling to the platform with a unique copper and acrylic waterblock. Intel has deliberately removed overspeed protection from the platform components, as befits a machine targeting the speed demons of extreme gaming. For those bad boys who go beyond the prescribed limits, however, the Intel disclaimers are unmistakably stern.
Systems based on the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX9775 and Intel Desktop Board D5400X will be offered by several PC manufacturers, including Armari, Boxx Technologies, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Maingear Computers, Puget Custom Computers, Scan Computers, Velocity Micro, Vigor Gaming Computer, Voodoo Computers, @Xi Computer, and others.
Only the most devoted gaming enthusiast is likely to plunk down the dollars for a Skulltrail system, but there are other options available for those whose budgets are on a more terrestrial scale. Intel® GMA X3000 technology advances are narrowing the boundaries between discrete game acceleration cards and integrated graphics chipsets. While there will be a certain percentage of high-end games that will require a discrete card for a satisfying gaming experience, many top-tier games perform very respectably on systems equipped with the latest generation integrated graphics architecture from Intel.
