PC sport obtain occasions may very well be about to shrink, because of AMD – PCGamesN

AMD’s new Neural Texture Block Compression system is because of be unveiled quickly, promising to cut back the time ready for video games to obtain.
Ben Hardwidge
Printed: Jun 26, 2024
AMD has simply revealed that it’s engaged on a system that makes use of AI to cut back the scale of sport downloads sooner or later. The expertise is known as Neural Texture Block Compression, and AMD says it plans to current it on the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) in London initially of July 2024.
Very like Nvidia, AMD is making a giant deal about AI for the time being, with AMD AI even being the brand new model identify for its laptop computer gaming CPUs. Nonetheless, it nonetheless has a number of catching as much as do with Nvidia on this entrance. Its present GPUs, such because the Radeon RX 7800 XT, for instance, could also be among the many best graphics cards for gaming, however their AI matrix cores are nonetheless largely going unused in video games proper now.
In its newest announcement, the AMD says it’s developed a brand new methodology of compressing sport textures utilizing a neural community. In a post on X (previously Twitter), the AMD GPUOpen account said that “no one likes downloading large sport packages,” including that its new AI texture compression approach would end in “decreasing information measurement.”
Not solely that, however AMD is assured that builders might get the brand new system up and working in video games shortly and simply. “Unchanged runtime execution permits simple sport integration,” says the corporate.
Textures are one of many areas that take up a number of area in sport installs, notably as avid gamers demand increased resolutions with extra element, and if the textures from AMD’s new compression system preserve sufficient element, and take up much less area than present textures, then it might certainly scale back the scale of sport installs.

This isn’t the primary time such a system has been touted, nevertheless. Certainly, in August 2023, Nvidia revealed a research paper at Siggraph 2023, known as Random-Entry Neural Compression of Materials Textures. Equally, this paper detailed a system of utilizing AI to compress textures, with great-looking leads to the screenshots.
The paper reveals how an uncompressed (admittedly large) 4,096 x 4,096 texture takes up 256MB, and this drops down to five.3MB if it’s scaled right down to 1,024 x 1,024 and makes use of block compression methods. Nonetheless, with Nvidia’s AI-based texture compression system, the identical texture might stay at 4,096 x 4,096, retaining way more element, and nonetheless solely take up 3.8MB.
It stays to be seen if AMD shall be taking an analogous method to Nvidia, however we’ll be discovering out extra info quickly. July 2024 can even be the month that the primary Zen 5 CPUs lastly get launched, so AMD has a busy time forward.
Ben Hardwidge A tech journalist since 1999, and a PC {hardware} fanatic since 1989, Ben has seen all of it, from the horrors of CGA graphics to the wonderful ray-tracing GPUs of at this time. Ben is especially within the newest CPU and graphics tech, and at the moment spends most of his evenings enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3.

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