AMD has simply revealed that it’s engaged on a system that makes use of AI to scale back the dimensions 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 in the beginning of July 2024.
Very similar to Nvidia, AMD is making an enormous deal about AI in the meanwhile, with AMD AI even being the brand new model title for its laptop computer gaming CPUs. Nevertheless, it nonetheless has a variety 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 greatest graphics playing 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 put up on X (previously Twitter), the AMD GPUOpen account acknowledged that “no one likes downloading big sport packages,” including that its new AI texture compression approach would end in “decreasing knowledge dimension.”
Not solely that, however AMD is assured that builders might get the brand new system up and operating in video games shortly and simply. “Unchanged runtime execution permits straightforward sport integration,” says the corporate.
Textures are one of many areas that take up a variety of area in sport installs, notably as players demand greater 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 cut back the dimensions of sport installs.
This isn’t the primary time such a system has been touted, nonetheless. Certainly, in August 2023, Nvidia printed a analysis 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 ends in the screenshots.
The paper reveals how an uncompressed (admittedly big) 4,096 x 4,096 texture takes up 256MB, and this drops down to five.3MB if it’s scaled all the way down to 1,024 x 1,024 and makes use of block compression methods. Nevertheless, with Nvidia’s AI-based texture compression system, the identical texture might stay at 4,096 x 4,096, retaining rather more element, and nonetheless solely take up 3.8MB.
It stays to be seen if AMD will likely be taking an identical method to Nvidia, however we’ll be discovering out extra data quickly. July 2024 may also be the month that the primary Zen 5 CPUs lastly get launched, so AMD has a busy time forward.
