Nitrado supercharges gaming servers with AMD processors

Nitrado supercharges gaming servers with AMD processors

Nitrado gained up to 60% performance increases for its game server infrastructure, reduced energy consumption and lowered costs with AMD CPUs.

Multiplayer online games are incredibly diverse. From sprawling open-world survival games to fast player-versus-player competitions, each title has unique game server requirements. Some games rely on single-core clock speeds for optimal performance; others need a higher core count for parallel tasks. Getting the balance right is critical. In multiplayer gaming, players may be anywhere in the world and milliseconds of response time can mean the difference between victory and defeat. These demands make operating a large game server infrastructure especially challenging, a reality well known by Nitrado. Ultimately, the company turned to AMD and the AMD Ryzen™ and EPYC™ processors to power this full-throttle gaming.

For nearly 25 years, Nitrado has been a leader in game hosting, alongside its subsidiary, Apex Hosting. Nitrado offers direct-to-consumer server rentals for such popular multiplayer games as Dune: Awakening, DayZ, Minecraft and more. It also operates GameFabric, a multiplayer server orchestration platform optimized for use by game development studios.

After a strategic review of industry directions, Nitrado launched a search for a next-gen CPU architecture that would help it maintain its leadership in performance and value. Finding the right processor for game server infrastructure is more than a technological challenge. The CPU performance affects player retention, competitive integrity and, ultimately, a game’s commercial success. Nitrado wanted better single-core performance for latency-sensitive game server tasks, especially important for the GameFabric platform. The company also needed CPUs that could handle the diverse compute needs of the dozens of multiplayer games available on its hosted offering. Reducing energy consumption and costs were also on the list. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor and the AMD EPYC 9474F CPUs met all these demands and more.

Making developer visions real with superior gameplay

Nitrado has optimized GameFabric, its game server orchestration platform for studios, for the intense compute needs of serving thousands of concurrent players around the world. Key server-side operations include game state updating, or the tick rate; complex physics calculations; sophisticated AI behavior; real-time collision detection; and rapidly processing network data packets. Any latency or bottlenecks in these areas can hurt the player experience and tarnish a game’s reputation because of perceptible lags, inconsistent hit registration, unresponsive AI and overall sluggish gameplay.

Integrating the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X into GameFabric’s fleet of bare metal servers unlocked substantial advances in the platform’s single-core processing capabilities. Nitrado selected the processor for its 16 high-performance cores, 32 threads and AMD “Zen 4” architecture. The processor on GameFabric servers enables rapid game logic execution and instant responses to player actions, translating into the immersive gaming experiences envisioned by game developers. The upgrade also increased GameFabric’s server density, delivering operational savings while boosting performance.

Elevating gameplay standards for private player communities

For its direct-to-consumer offerings, Nitrado and Apex Hosting have deployed both the AMD Ryzen™ processor and the AMD EPYC 9474F CPU. The company determined that the 48 cores and 96 threads in the AMD EPYC processor, with a clock boost up to 3.95 GHz, are ideal for games with substantial RAM requirements, where total throughput and memory capacity are essential. In addition, the AMD EPYC 9474F processor enables Nitrado to achieve a higher service density on its hardware. By hosting more game instances per server, Nitrado optimizes its revenue-to-cost ratio and delivers better value to customers while maintaining strong performance for many different game profiles.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, with boost capabilities up to 5.7GHz, powers Nitrado game servers for titles that are especially sensitive to single-core clock speed. multiplayer games benefit greatly from this high frequency performance, resulting in higher server tick rates, increased instructions per cycle (IPC), more responsive game logic and an overall smoother gaming experience.

More processing power delivers substantial performance gains

Nitrado’s transition to AMD CPU architecture across its platforms has yielded substantial and quantifiable improvements, directly benefiting the countless gamers who trust Nitrado and Apex Hosting for their game server needs.

Nitrado and Apex Hosting’s servers equipped with AMD EPYC 9474F processors delivered a dramatic 60% increase in single-core performance and an impressive 20% reduction in overall power consumption per CPU compared to the previous older generation competitor chipsets Nitrado used. This substantial decrease in energy use per EPYC processor lowers operations expense and total cost of ownership for Nitrado and reduces the environmental footprint of its large-scale hosting operations. Lower costs also enable Nitrado to offer more competitive pricing.

The deployment of AMD processors has also benefited gaming studios that rely on Nitrado’s GameFabric platform for managing their game creations. GameFabric, along with Nitrado and Apex Hosting, realized a 50% increase in single-core performance with the AMD Ryzen™ 9 7950X when compared to the competing chipset the AMD processor replaced. This significant group-wide single-core uplift empowers the Nitrado group to offer superior computational power for a broader range of CPU-intensive game titles, directly optimizing server stability across all platforms.

The strategic implementation of AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and AMD EPYC 9474F processors is a milestone in Nitrado’s continuous optimization of its game server infrastructure, enabling gamers to enjoy superior online experiences while game developers have the performance they need to create, launch and scale the next generation of immersive online experiences.