Johan AnderssonTechnical Director

Frostbite

AMD GPU’14 Tech Day

BF4 + FROSTBITE + MANTLE

Long term relationship & collaboration Worked together for 9 years Started with Battlefield 2 back in 2004

Work very closely with multiple AMD teams Developer relations, technology & driver teams Focus areas: Quality, performance & robustness Special features: Eyefinity, Stereo 3D, Crossfire Special events: BF4 GDC demo – 2x 7990 and 4k @ 60 fps

Regular meetings with AMD hardware architects & key staff Amazing & fun discussions to adapt & align future hardware & software One can (and have!) affect GPU hardware design!

DICE & AMD

Our next-generation engine

Mission: Empower game creators and create great games

The platform across Electronic Arts for shooters, RPGs, RTS, racing games and more

FROSTBITE OVERVIEW

15+ games in development!FROSTBITE GAMES

Levolution

BATTLEFIELD 4 - QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

Levolution

Multiplayer water simulation

BATTLEFIELD 4 - QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

Levolution

Multiplayer water simulation

VFX

BATTLEFIELD 4 - QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

Levolution

Multiplayer water simulation

VFX

Compute shader lighting

BATTLEFIELD 4 - QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

Levolution

Multiplayer water simulation

VFX

Compute shader lighting

Post FX Bokeh DOF Subsurface scattering Velocity motion blur SSAA

BATTLEFIELD 4 - QUICK HIGHLIGHTS

Optimized for DirectX 11.1 & Radeon GPUs Been working closely with AMD on performance & quality – CPU & GPU Microsoft added optimizations on our request to DX11.1 in Windows 8, thx!

64-bit native multi-core executable 32-bit fallback for the 9% that do not have a modern CPU Frostbite has been parallelized further to run on up to 8 CPU cores

Scalability: From APU to multi-GPU Optimized both for low-end & high-end Scalable graphics Crossfire & Eyefinity

BATTLEFIELD 4 - TECH

An amazing platform with unique strengths From the lowest-end integrated laptop To quad-GPU super high-end desktops

PC is in our DNA at DICE It’s where we come from: Battlefield 1942 We strongly believe in & will continue to support

PC as a gaming platform

PC

Performance Support both the slowest and fastest hardware Not possible to utilize all CPU cores in DX & GL Heavy CPU draw, state & resource overhead is

holding back complex game scenes & content

Programmability PC is still stuck in software & memory model of

CPU spoon-feeding discrete GPU – no longer required!

CPU/GPU collaboration barely possible Not all modern GPU functionality is exposed

PC CHALLENGES Hardware & software abstractions

Necessary to support a rich varied PC hardware ecosystem, but…

Want to adapt our use cases & engine to the capabilities of the hardware – not limit it to the software layer on top of it

Have high-level information in the engine and could do smarter & more efficient decisions than the OS, driver or black box API can

APIs & abstractions evolve too slowly

(there are quite a few of them)

Limits how we can use modern GPUs & what game worlds we can build

As a contrast..

Develop only for a single hardware & system configuration All hardware functionality exposed to developer (almost) Low overhead OS Very thin graphics driver Explicit control over memory

Easier for us to develop & hit our targets with low-level access Lots of experience now from the next-gen consoles, both based on AMD’s GCN architecture

CONSOLES

Push the PC industry forward & create amazing games Massive dynamic & immersive worlds with photorealistic visuals Not be constrained in capabilities due to software or legacy

Need the best of both worlds to fully utilize modern PCs Console-style access & performance While keeping scalability and running on tons of different PCs

Required: a different approach to graphics APIs & drivers! Game engine (Frostbite) takes on large part of responsibility API & driver has today Driver is a thin abstraction over the hardware Key aspect: engine has explicit control over (most) memory & abstracted hardware components

Been talking to the graphics vendors for years to solve this…

WHAT WE WANT

An absolute highlight of our long term collaboration with AMD is coming to fruition:

Mantle

Low-level high-performance console-style graphics API for PC! YAY!

Built by AMD in close collaboration with us at DICE/EA Direct result of our discussions Will be cross platform, very important for us

Battlefield 4 is the pilot project & first user of Mantle Gamers will get the absolute best possible performance & experience out of AMD hardware

MANTLE

Frostbite 3 will render natively with Mantle on Windows Used instead of DirectX 11 on compatible Radeon GPUs Being developed right now!

Superb CPU performance Very low overhead rendering, loading & streaming Perfect parallel rendering - utilize all 8 CPU cores Avoid bottlenecking the GPU and the system

Highly optimized GPU usage Full access to graphics hardware capabilities Lots of low-level optimizations made possible

Foundation for the future This is only the beginning… There are many more games on Frostbite

MANTLE IN FROSTBITE

Launches on October 29th 64 player multiplayer awesomeness Advanced DirectX 11.1 renderer Optimized for Radeon GPUs Great Crossfire & Eyefinity support

In December: Mantle update! Custom built & heavily optimized rendering pipeline in

Frostbite using Mantle Get the absolute most out of your PC and Radeon GPU Released as a free & automatic game update Enjoy!

BATTLEFIELD 4

Super excited about Mantle! Will share more in the upcoming months

Tons of ideas going forward Low-latency multi-GPU rendering for VR? Dynamic game worlds living on the GPU? ….

FUTURE

THANKSTHANKS!

Email: repi@dice.seWeb: http://frostbite.comTwitter: @repi