Intel ® Visual

the guardian project
knowledge of each Guardian’s powers to
know which Guardians to use in each battle.
Just like Mike, they’ll have to engender
the undying support from the Guardians
and make quick knowledgeable decisions
as to how they are best used in battle.”
Krygowski said the main challenge in this
cross-platform launch has been on the
game side. The pipeline is thinner on the
game engine side, so assets and models
need to respect texture resolutions, rig
requirements, mapping, and megabyte
sizes. He said this is completely “doable,”
however forethought and pre-production
must be strong to address potential issues
regarding these details.
The Intel Connection
As Epic continues to expand its Unreal Engine 3
technology, it’s opening up more doors into
Hollywood. Collaboration between Intel and
Epic goes back more than 10 years to when
the two companies pioneered landmark-setting
uses of MMX technology. Today, performance
improvements through multi-threading are a
key focus. “Intel® Threading Building Blocks 2.1
allowed us to easily remove allocation-related
multi-threading bottlenecks on 64-bit operating
systems,” said Michael Capps, president of Epic
Games. “We are pleased to share the benefits
of Intel’s memory allocator with Unreal Engine
3 licensees, as well.” Through Intel® Software
Development Products recently available via the
Epic Integrated Partner Program, Unreal Engine
licensees have access to additional resources for
multi-threading and performance optimization of
their games.
Mark McNabb, Intel application engineer, said
that Epic Games’ recent high-end “Samaritan”
GDC 2011 demonstration running on a high-end
PC looks significantly better than anything
currently available on gaming consoles. “That
demo uses newer DX11 features that aren’t
available on the current consoles, but the newer
PCs support DX11,” said McNabb. “The demo
is intended to showcase the high-end GPU.
But, systems with high-end GPUs tend to also
contain high-end CPUs.”
Epic has capitalized on Intel engineering support
during the design of Unreal Engine 3, focusing
in particular on multi-core optimization and the
threading of 3D operations to take full advantage
of parallelization. The key optimization work
divided the main game thread into two individual
threads: one devoted to rendering and the
other to all remaining high-level operations. The
technique, called a “render split,” removes the
processing burden of rendering from the main
game loop. Regardless of what is going on in the
game loop, rendering calls run in parallel, resulting
in a substantial overall performance boost.
It’s this type of advanced power that has allowed
real-time feedback for Hollywood companies
such as HOM to implement this game engine
technology into all of its production work. Video
games, film, and television will benefit from these
advances as the lines continue to blur between
interactive and traditional entertainment.
The Future of
Entertainment
HOM has already integrated Unreal Engine 3
technology into its system, intending to employ
the game project on both video game and
Hollywood projects. Krygowski said that while
traditional TV entertainment still exists, it is fast
becoming the exception and not the rule. He said
the game engine has the ability to help push
the envelope of media by allowing creators to
build a single set of assets for a variety of media,
allowing for real-world environments, assets, and
characters to traverse multiple uses, resolutions,
and intentions.
“With the evolution of DirectX* technology and
rendering, hardware game-engine technology is
becoming more viable,” said Menache. “The trend
is that people like us will be building the tools,
and soon enough software like the UDK (Unreal
Development Kit) will be aimed more toward
creating linear content, as well.”
In Hollywood it all comes down to dollars and cents.
And Chargin believes that video game technology
will become a mainstay in Hollywood because of
economics. He said the Unreal Engine allows his
team to produce a higher quality product in a
fraction of the time of traditional CG animation.
Creatives can bank on this, moving forward. And
the implications for the game industry are also
huge, given that the sharing of assets built in the
same engine will allow for more immersive
experiences. But perhaps more importantly, it will
blur the lines between interactive and linear
entertainment—just as The Guardian Project and
its cast of 30 superheroes is doing. •
About the Author
John Gaudiosi has spent nearly 20 years covering
the video game industry. He also co-founded the
world’s first syndicated video game and
technology network, www.Gamerlive.tv.
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