Mar 11, 2021 — For nearly 30 years, Epic Games has had a proven track record of success in the game development industry. The company's latest platform, Unreal Engine 4, ...
AMD kooperiert mit Epic Games - Threadripper Pro als Schlüssel für dezentrales Arbeiten an eigenen Workstations im Home-Office | igor´sLAB
AMD accelerates Unreal Engine development workflows with RyzenTM ThreadripperTM CPUs Epic Games sees dramatic performance increase and enhanced productivity CUSTOMER INDUSTRY Media & Entertainment; Games and Software Development; AEC CHALLENGES To streamline the code compiling process and achieve faster iteration and shading times. In addition, to enable the engineers to work quickly and effectively from home during the pandemic. SOLUTION Epic Games replaced its previous workstation CPUs with AMD RyzenTM ThreadripperTM 3970X/3990X and Lenovo P620 with AMD RyzenTM ThreadripperTM PRO 3995WX. RESULTS Using Threadripper in their workstations, Epic was able to compile the engine much faster than before without having to rely on additional cores in the cloud. In addition, the iteration time and the time for compiling shaders was drastically reduced. TECHNOLOGY AT A GLANCE AMD Ryzen Threadripper and Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU TECHNOLOGY PARTNER For nearly 30 years, Epic Games has had a architecture, Unreal Engine has been the proven track record of success in the game premier real-time rendering solution since development industry. The company's latest 2016, with world-class firms such as HKS, platform, Unreal Engine 4, is the world's Foster + Partners, ZAHA Hadid, and Zoan leading game engine across PC, console, all leveraging it. and mobile devices. Epic Games also But creating an engine flexible enough for all developed Fortnite, the number one game these diverse usage scenarios requires the in the world, which generated $2.4 billion tightest possible code. Epic in revenue in 2018 and more Games has historically than $1.8 billion in 2019. "There's nothing else that struggled against a significant Staying at the top of the can compare to what the challenge during development. game design industry in this Threadripper 3990X CPU "One of the most common way takes a combination of does in any price range." workflows is compiling code -- creative flair and strategic Pat Swanson, IT Engineer a process that can be implementation of the latest massively parallelized," technology. Epic Games has maintained its explains Nick Penwarden, VP of Engineering lead by giving its development team the very at Epic Games. "For us, the ability to quickly best hardware to work with, allowing the compile and iterate code is critical to quality." developers to achieve their goals in the fastest time possible. This constant need for speed led the company to AMD RyzenTM ThreadripperTM processors, which promised to take workflow performance to the next level. The team couldn't find a solution that offered both high clock speed and high parallelism simultaneously. "It's a big challenge when you can save five or 10 minutes on your compiling but then lose five Powering real-time 3D minutes on your linking," says Pat Swanson, beyond games Unreal Engine has more than 11 "The numbers we were getting were just jaw- million licensees and is seeing a dropping. I could show them rapid adoption into industries to any engineer, and their beyond gaming, including media response was, `Can I have and entertainment, live events, one of those? Please?" automotive, architecture, healthcare, and simulation. Since 2016, Unreal Engine 4 has Andrew Grant, Technical Director been used in more than 120 film and an IT Engineer with the End User Team. That was, until they came across the AMD Ryzen Threadripper, which promised a single, desktop solution that solved the need for a distributed build mechanism and enabled the rapid code iteration they longed for. television productions such as The Changing the game with AMD Ryzen Mandalorian; Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker; Threadripper CPUs HBO's Game of Thrones; and Westworld. Epic Games tried AMD Ryzen Threadripper In the automotive industry, manufacturers CPUs with a range of its workloads and were use Unreal Engine for everything from design absolutely blown away by the performance and engineering to final sales and marketing the processors could deliver. "3rd Gen renders. Surveys by industry-leading Threadripper CPUs with 32 and 64 cores were publication CG Architect show that in a gamechanger," says Andrew Grant, Technical AMD + EPIC GAMES CASE STUDY Technical Director in Epic Games' Special Products Group. "They offered "The dream would be for every one of our engineers to have a significantly more processing power than anything we could build Threadripper under their desk and maybe a second one to access as a ourselves with the hardware we'd previously used. It was nothing short building system," says Grant. of a watershed moment." The new Threadripper CPUs have so many cores and offer so much The tests Grant performed with Unreal Engine workloads were a speed, the team's engineers and developers have been able to work on revelation. In an internal engine build test of software executables, an multiple projects at once -- unlike before. "Using Threadripper, we're able Intel® CoreTM i9-9900X with 10 cores (used for event demos) took 46 minutes and 43 seconds, whereas a Threadripper 3970X with 32 cores took a mere 15 minutes and 12 seconds less than a third of the time. In the same test, an Intel® CoreTM I9-10900X with 10 cores (again, used for event demos) took 40 minutes and 34 seconds, whereas "Using Threadripper, we're able to compile the engine much more quickly than we could previously. That's a huge efficiency boost for all the engineers on the team." Nick Penwarden, VP of Engineering to compile the engine much more quickly than we could previously," says Penwarden. "That's a huge efficiency boost for all the engineers on the team. The less time they're spending compiling code, the more time they can spend actually developing features, testing the functionality, and working on improving Unreal Engine." a Threadripper 3990X with 64 cores took only 12 at Epic Games Thanks to Threadripper, iterations now take a fraction minutes. In a cook test, where content is of the time they used to. Compiling and rebuilding integrated into the engine, the Intel® CoreTM i9-9900X and 10900X took shaders have also become much faster. The team's engineers and around 60 percent longer than the Threadripper 3970X and 3990X. And developers can now touch anything and rebuild the entire engine in with other scenarios such as tasks with fewer cores or backed by the less than 10 minutes versus the 30-40 minutes it used to take. IncrediBuild distributed compute platform, the team still saw notable increases almost across the board. Increased productivity Overall, the 3rd Gen Threadripper CPUs achieved a 60 to 100 percent increase in performance on tasks that could utilize all cores versus the dual 12-core Xeon systems the team was using, for a fraction of the price. Threadripper was so fast, Swanson had to run the benchmarks several times before he realized the results weren't incorrect. "The numbers we were getting were just jaw-dropping," As Epic started to deploy Threadripper workstations to key engineers working from home it proved to be a huge win. "While users at the office were saving 10 to 15 minutes," Swanson said. "Users at home were saving hours. After that, many users were so excited about the numbers their peers were getting, they went out and bought their own Threadripper CPUs for their setups at home." enthuses Grant. "Every engineer I showed them to asked, `Can I The Epic team reports that switching to Threadripper CPUs has have one of those? Please?'" generated a lot of excitement within the organization. "There's Enhanced performance for developers working at home Putting a single Threadripper on an engineer's desk provided such enhanced performance over using IncrediBuild that Epic Games decided to equip its key engineering team members with Threadripper CPUbased workstations. nothing else that can compare to what the Threadripper 3990X CPU does in any price range," says Swanson. "I could ask another manufacturer to send me a $20,000 chip, and the Threadripper is still going to match it or beat it. It's not that money is a barrier here, but the price-performance ratio is lopsided. It's a no-brainer." About Epic Games Founded in 1991, Epic Games is an American company founded by CEO Tim Sweeney. The company is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina and has more than 40 offices worldwide. Today Epic is a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology. Epic operates Fortnite, one of the world's largest games with over 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. Epic also develops Unreal Engine, which powers the world's leading games and is also adopted across industries such as film and television, architecture, automotive, manufacturing, and simulation. Through Unreal Engine, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services, Epic provides an end-to-end digital ecosystem for developers and creators to build, distribute, and operate games and other content. For more information, visit epicgames.com. About AMD For more than 50 years, AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies--the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses, and cuttingedge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work, and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. More information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow is available at these links: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO | AMD Ryzen Threadripper. All performance and cost savings claims are provided by Epic Games and have not been independently verified by AMD. Performance and cost benefits are impacted by a variety of variables. Results herein are specific to Epic Games and may not be typical. GD-181 ©2021 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Ryzen, Threadripper, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies. AMD + EPIC GAMES CASE STUDYmacOS Version 10.14.6 (Build 18G8022) Quartz PDFContext