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Broken Silicon's next guest will be Bryan Heemskerk, a developer at Massive Damage Studios!  He has been on before multiple times, and has become a fan favorite due to his excellent knowledge not just in game development - but also in GPU architectures!

  • What's going on with "Console Ports"?
  • Should Sony / MS should bother with Pro Consoles?
  • R9 7950X3D & 7900X3D (Bryan has Zen 4 X3D)
  • Expectations of Phoenix and other Upcoming APUs
  • If RDNA 3 will be "fixed" this Summer

He can talk about anything with decent authority, so don't hold back!  Anything regarding recent (or upcoming) GPU, CPU, and console releases is fair game!

You have ~16 hours to submit below!


Previous Bryan Episode: https://youtu.be/k6qDwx--R-0

Bryan's Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/bryanheemskerk?lang=en

Comments

FloridaMan

{Adapted from my post on Reader Mail: General} Hi Bryan, when you use your X3D chip, I imagine there are situations where you want to play a game on one CCD and have a productivity application on the other, but this doesn't occur by default due to core parking. You must manually pick threads or have a multi threaded application span both CCDs. Firstly, does this bother you? Secondly, what would you prefer AMDs X3D thread logic to be, since it currently relies on the Xbox game bar?

Anonymous

Why did Massive Damage Studios use Direct3D 11 over OpenGL or Vulkan to make Star Renegades? Will Massive Damage Studios ship Star Renegades with native Linux support? If reimplementing the graphics API calls with a native Linux API is a problem, has you looked at DXVK-Native to translate Direct3D 11 to Vulkan? Also, what about MacOS support? Intel modified DXVK to implement the D3D9 DDI to use their vulkan driver for certain D3D9 games. This was a surprise to me because they reportedly have not yet implemented vulkan graphics pipeline support in their Windows driver, which DXVK needs to mitigate shader compilation stutter. When that is implemented, how likely is Intel to drop their native D3D9 DDI implementation in favor of DXVK? DXVK also supports D3D10 and D3D11. How likely is Intel to begin using DXVK to do D3D10+D3D11 to vulkan translation in their Windows driver? What are your thoughts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck? Non-overclocked DDR5-8400 that does 67.2GB/sec per DIMM will arrive on the market in a few years. How do you see this changing integrated graphics?

Anonymous

John Carmack wrote an article praising the use of static analysis when developing games at ID Software. Would you tell us about the use of static analysis at Massive Damage Studios?

Anonymous

Why do so few studios release the source code to their games like ID Software used to do?

Anonymous

Nvidia develops a unified driver that runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etcetera. It used to even run on MacOS before Apple’s hostility caused Nvidia to stop shipping a MacOS driver. AMD and Intel on the other hand split their development teams into two, developing independent Windows and Linux drivers while leaving MacOS graphics driver development entirely to Apple. Nvidia gains obvious benefits from deduplication of effort, but neither AMD nor Intel seem to be interested in doing the same despite the shader compilers largely doing the same thing on both platforms. The only exception is AMD’s vulkan user mode driver, which AMD develops for both Windows and Linux despite the Linux community developing an excellent driver one with Valve’s help. AMD could effectively increase its man power for free if it would just join the community development effort and reuse it on Windows; they already joined the community effort in all other areas on Linux, but do not reuse the result on Windows. Intel on the other hand reused DXVK, but nothing else. Why do AMD and Intel insist on maintaining this duplication of effort?

Anonymous

Hi Bryan and Tom, We have seen only a few games implement ray tracing effectively and maintain 60 fps. Mainly, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Fortnite, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart and the Spider-Man games. The studios that made these games also created the game engine. These games prove that the consoles are more capable of ray tracing than initially thought and these games run better on PC as well. When will we start seeing more games and engines capable of delivering ray tracing and 60 fps on console?

Anonymous

Hello Tom and Bryan! Why do you think that asynchronous time warp is only used in VR? I tried Comrade Stinger's demo on my LG C2 and the effect felt great, 60fps feels like 120fps at a minimal loss to image quality. Also can't fovieted rendering be used to some extent in regular games as well?

Anonymous

For GPUs, is the AMD toolchain better, worse, or roughly equal to Nvidia's? AMD has consoles and is highly committed to open sourcing a lot of things, while Nvidia has CUDA and much more maturity and support. Is either more pleasant to optimise a game for? Or is this just too low-level and most game companies don't bother with this?

Anonymous

Mobile games are able to get amazing graphics from using tiled rendering that reduces memory bandwidth requirements to a level that integrated graphics can sustain. Why do PC and console games seem to avoid this technique?

Anonymous

Why are a number of game developers hell bent on bundling malware in the form of kernel anticheat in their games? It allows for a third party back door into any system using it and risks destabilizing machines, yet is well known to be ineffective since it violates the basic security principle of physical access being game over. Server side techniques are far more effective since cheat developers cannot reverse engineer those, do not violate the security principle of physical access being game over and do not put backdoors into end user systems or risk destabilizing them due to bad programming or kernel updates from Microsoft that are incompatible with whatever hacks the kernel anticheat module uses.

Anonymous

Hey Tom and Bryan! This is a curiosity of mine but how impact is denuvo on game performance? And another question I had but what alternatives are there to kernal level anti cheats? I see many people play call of duty or Valorant even though they have kernal level anti cheats. Is there a better way to combat cheaters? Thanks again!

Anonymous

Hey tom and Bryan, I know it’s a bit off topic, butIt dawned on me the other day when you were talking about the latest console gen becoming outdated that clx could bring us back to the days of expansion packs and other accessories to consoles. Aside from its use in the server market, it seems a perfect fit for expanding the functionality of consoles. Do you see this happening in future consoles. Would it make porting games from pc easier, due to the customization. On the other hand I can see it making things more difficult because you don’t have a set target anymore much like developers encounter in the pc space. Keep up the good work. It is very refreshing to have someone without bias do deep dives in hardware. -Shane