How are you planning on handling the graphical toll as players enter a system with multiple space stations, millions of objects and thousands of players all in one location? Currently, XenoThreat can sometimes cause a rather nifty PowerPoint presentation for people, sometimes even when there are fewer than 30 hanging around.
TL;DRAli Brown says heavy battles like XenoThreat are mostly CPU-bound; Gen12 will help but isn't the only part, and game and engine teams must keep optimizing.
I think a lot of that will be CPU issues, usually. I mean, we'd have to profile each case. But when we've looked at things like XenoThreat, it's nearly always a CPU cost. And generally, in a space battle like XenoThreat, in terms of polygon count, it can't be that high. I mean, you're in space. There's a limit to what you could see on screen. Even if half the screen is filled with space, that gives you an enormous amount of budget to spend on the bits that aren't space. So yeah, we do have some things like gas clouds, which are more expensive in space. But otherwise, it's not usually a GPU concern in space. It's CPU. Now, to beat the same drum again, Gen12 is one of the major parts of the solution for CPU performance, but it's not the only part. And when it comes to XenoThreat, that will be the game code. There will be a lot happening there. There'll be a lot of lasers firing, all sorts of things happening. The optimization there is largely going to come from the game teams, I think. Obviously, as we're removing as much as we can from the rendering side, the graphics, the CPU cost of that will free up more time for them. Ultimately, I think we'll get to a point where we'll get better, but then it'll be on their teams to take the mantle and push it further. So yeah, I think we can handle it from the graphics side. As we do Gen12, we'll definitely improve how easily we can handle it. But then the game team and the engine team will have to continue to optimize, which they're doing every day. There's constant emails, constant work being done on that side.