Posted by
Lord Archaleon on Friday, January 26, 2007 3:20:11 PM
Isn't this wonderful?
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2368
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2368&p=2
Intel's adding cores and caches to improve performance until stacked-die technology becomes absolutely necessary. This means that Intel will probably stay ahead of the game and drive AMD's prices down.
Stacked-die tech will allow computers to better emulate 3d physics because of the new connection between the CPU and RAM. Of course, operating systems will first have to be updated to give programmers access to this memory, but these changes will probably happen after 2015.
In 3d physics emulations, collision detection consumes a lot of CPU power. The current BSP or octree solutions (3d maps divided into channels, partitioned to reduce the number of object XYZ-location comparisons) will likely make first effective use of stacked RAM.
Imagine a game like Morrowind using normal RAM to hold world gamedata and map information, loading the local on-screen environment into stacked RAM. Let's not worry about invalid pointers yet.
201x computers will probably have 256 MB stacked RAM and 512 MB to 2 GB RAM. RtCW uses 128 MB RAM and a 300 MB swapfile. Now what happens when the BSP is in that stacked RAM? The collision detection speed increases because the RAM is so easy to read. So that means we can skip BSP altogether because it's RAM-intensive right?
No. Although BSP will use up stacked RAM in this scenario, BSP allows an engine to efficiently spend CPU cycles. Other than physics calculations, 3d games don't have any other major purpose for stacked RAM. Games will be able to increase the number of objects and clients in a map. Yes, asynch socket communications will be done in stacked RAM.
While bandwidth won't yet allow for anything super cool like 3d mesh deforming across a server-client connection, server-client games will have more dynamic objects and collision detection. This means more details. I expect enhanced player model mesh collisions: tripping, bumping, hitting your head.
Broadband clients are ready to download big data, but game servers can't do the work. Let's look at some specs.
"In general you would like to be able to provide an update rate to all players of at least 20 updates per second."
T1: (150,000 bytes / sec) / (32 players) = 4688 bytes / sec / player
T2: (630,000 bytes / sec) / (64 players) = 9843 bytes / sec / player*
T3: (4,500,000 bytes / sec) / (256 players) = 17578 bytes / sec / player*
T4: (27,400,000 bytes / sec) / (1024 players) = 26757 bytes / sec / player*
* Inferred stats
http://rocketland.planetquake.gamespy.com/haqsau/serversetup.shtml
A few good servers out there run games on T2 lines or better (probably college students or dedicated hobbyists). Some companies rent out game servers, and the cost ranges from $20 - $150 / month.
The value of 3d games which use stacked RAM should increase demand for higher bandwidth solutions. 256 player games in the year 2015? I'm game, aren't you?