Great gaming experiences aren't just about detailed and realistic graphics - they require interesting and exciting gameplay as well. Gameplay refers to the ways in which a game responds to the player's choices and actions. ATI Stream allows the GPU to enhance these important aspects of games by accelerating a wide range of algorithms that go beyond graphics rendering, including physics simulation, artificial intelligence and more.
Froblins demo demonstrates how GPGPU computations can be used to enhance gameplay by tapping the powerful parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs to accelerate Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is generally considered to be one of the key components of any computer game, since it controls how all other characters behave and interact with the player. A more sophisticated AI system allows for more interesting and fun gameplay.
In many scenarios, the AI computations include dynamic path finding. This involves simulating a characters’ behavior, and/or running a terrain analysis to identify and update good or valid paths as a result of changing conditions and user input. While there have been tremendous improvements in parallelizing rendering computations through the evolution of consumer GPU architectures, artificial intelligence computations are trailing behind in this regard. To date, there have been few attempts at parallelizing AI computations to take better advantage of the massive processing power of modern PCs.
The Froblins demo uses the GPU to perform pathfinding calculations for thousands of characters in parallel. These calculations are updated many times per second, allowing the characters to start exhibiting emergent behaviors, such as lane formation, queuing, and reactions to other characters. The latest ATI Radeon™ GPUs provide the processing power to perform these tasks while still generating high quality visuals, with advanced features such as tessellation, global illumination, and anti-aliasing enabled.