Gadgetory

hey everybody I'm Steve from gamers access net and I'm joined again by Alva come from the total war Warhammer team at Creative Assembly we previously talked about some of the new Warhammer features on the game inside now we be talking about so the optimization stuff the technology and before we get to that this coverage up from PAX East 2016 is brought to you by cyber power to make the fan book that we recently overclocked past four gigahertz so wow what what can we talk about immediately with regard to the engine what's the most interesting thing to talk about with Total War well I think we could probably start with yeah the engine optimizations that we've done essentially graphics programming team has taken quite a lot of time in the schedule this time around months in fact to work simply on optimizations and you know implement things in a more efficient way so one of the things we've done there is we've got a much better sense of load balancing across the different CPU cores in Warhammer than we've ever had before so for example we used to have the game logic and the renderer running on the single thread which you know kind of maxes out one core maxes out one thread leaving the other threads not really doing an awful lot and we've decoupled those so information is passed and one thread to the other from the game not into the renderer so now you're seeing a much more evenly balanced load across the across the different CPU cores so and that's really helping just with general frame rates and the model update which dictates you know how smoothly everything runs after and frame rate so so with the game logic thread and the renderer thread what are some things that each of those does what's the logic thread responsible for so the logic thread is responsible for welfare essentially for the game running for everything you see on screen so in a battle it's it's running the battle model which is literally executing everything you're seeing so you know you give an order to something it's moving away you're seeing all the animations different units and they're clashing those calculations are done the a is the a is responding that's all that's all bound up in the game logic so in the battle model so and then it pass the information to renderer which then draws what you see on screen so so yeah having those separated is a big win basically frame frame rate wise on the GPU side we were targeting for it sounds like you've some other particle effects to the GPU yeah we've offloaded our particle simulations model to the GPU that again that used to be able to CPU so that's yet more load off the CPU making it less CPU bound that we've ever been so we've also optimized our targeted task system as well which is you know everything that's being executed by the CPU to further balanced load across across the different calls so once again it's more of a win less CPU bound GPUs freed up to do its job better so what about some of the anti-aliasing techniques so you doing anything special there yeah we've actually we've done a ton of optimization with MSA so R 2 R 2 anti-aliasing solutions we've got in the game MLA and MSA a so you know MLA a being a bit of a post-process hat almost so you know it improves it improves the look and feel and doesn't hit the frame rate too badly MSA is much more much more framerate intensive so what we've done there we've made our solution a bit more kind of selective and a bit more intelligent about what actually aunty aliases so looks at the whole scene it looks for the edges rather than rather than anti-aliasing every line every line and every edge is just looking for the edges which are going to be visible to the player so and it's selectively anti-alias as those all of which adds up to less you know less hit on the framerate this will be something of course it's still you know it's still a fairly intensive operation but much less than before and we've got MSA a two four and eight times running yeah so it's not not as abusive because it's just only anti-aliasing the things that actually can be visibly seen exactly yeah so if you think of ever you know a soldier standing side on and the edges are there that's where you're gonna see the jaggies so that's what it's working on rather than absolutely everything so sure and other future topics of course we'll eventually be able to talk about DirectX 12 you're working with AMD on that right yeah work very closely with work we have got AMD engineers coming into our offices and helping and helping the graphics team out with that so yeah we'll be rolling that out we're happy performance it's great and it's nice and stable so what's this based on the I guess one one final note here just on the game itself so reminder what's the launch day in any any major items you wanna remind people of with total war Warhammer yeah so we're launching on May 24th actually so ya know it's any month away now wow it's kind of scary but yeah yeah I would say get on our social media and look at look look at some of the videos we're putting out of gameplay at the moment and yeah it's just not like any other tie ball game ever made basically very cool so to see more about the fusion of a Warhammer in total war links in the description below for more information thank you as always for the information right good to see and we'll see you all next time