It's all good stuff! Xishanju GDC speech: 'Unlimited Machine' uses VG to break through the problem of game rendering efficiency

With the rapid development of technology and the continuous growth of the gaming industry, users’ demand for gaming experience is gradually increasing. Players are becoming more and more professional and "picky". They are no longer satisfied with simple recreation and entertainment, but are pursuing immersive experience and spiritual satisfaction in high-quality games.

In order to keep up with the changes of players and meet their expectations, at this stage, game producers have turned their attention to picture production and are committed to providing a more exquisite and shocking game visual experience.

However, this has caused game manufacturers to face a common problem: as the scale of the game increases, the complexity of the scene, and the accuracy of the model increase, the production process requires the use of multi-level LOD, which makes the art resources The workload of production has increased significantly, requiring a large amount of art labor. At the same time, the game development cycle has also been extended accordingly.

As an outstanding domestic leading game manufacturer, Xishanju appeared at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and delivered a speech with its years of continuous innovative product research and development capabilities. At the Unity lecture at the conference, Huang Jinshou, technical director of Xishanju Engine Platform, introduced how the "Unlimited Machine" product uses VG (Virtual Geometry) to improve rendering efficiency, efficiently complete the production of high-precision models and huge maps in the game, and make the game more visually appealing. It has achieved a qualitative leap in providing players with a high-quality gaming experience to solve long-standing problems in the gaming industry. It demonstrates the achievements and progress made by Chinese game research and development in hard surface rendering technology, and also symbolizes our important attempts in Chinese science fiction and mecha-themed works.

The game was first revealed at the TGA (The Game Award) at the end of 2023. During the awards period, the number of first-look plays was second only to "Black Myth: Wukong" and surpassed other games including "Marvel's Spider-Man 2" A number of 3A games have attracted a lot of attention from players. The rich battle modes, unique mechas, real-time ballistic calculations and rich scene building destruction effects have made players full of expectations for this game.

The art production cycle is long? VG helps efficient and high-precision rendering

With the powerful support of VG technology, the game team only needs to produce high-precision models, and artists no longer need to invest extra time and energy in producing LOD resources. The program-generated LOD model , whose efficiency and effectiveness are due to handcrafting.

At the same time, at GDC, Huang Jinshou also introduced a complete set of GPU high-efficiency rendering solutions. The GPU is responsible for the calculation of cropping, LOD calculation, sorting and other operations originally performed by the CPU, thereby reducing the energy consumption of the CPU for rendering and allowing the CPU to focus more on game logic calculations, thus fully utilizing the time of the GPU and CPU. , Reduce the waste of computing power caused by waiting for each other.

(The complete rendering pipeline process is completed in the GPU)

In the sharing, Huang Jinshou also mentioned that the game’s vegetation system is specially designed for the project Customized development allows the vegetation system to support VG, rendering all trees and grass in the game through VG, and also supports interaction. Moreover, the vegetation system supports Imposters, which look like solid model trees from a close distance and imposters of a few simple patches from a distance. These vegetations also support destructible rings and interactions, and these collision detections are all calculated by the GPU. In the actual application of the game, multiple players are allowed to fire bullets at the same time and destroy the vegetation in the scene. Due to the large number of bullets, the processing load of calculating collision detection is very high. In order to solve this problem, the production team made full use of the parallel computing power of the GPU to perform efficient collision detection, enabling it to support a large number of bullets for accurate collision detection at the same time.

(Based on the interactive vegetation that can be realized by VG)

Moreover, VG greatly increases the number of triangles in a single scene, which can break through the previous number limit. Conventional The number of model triangles is no longer a bottleneck for rendering efficiency. At GDC, Huang Jinshou conducted a scene demonstration to demonstrate the rendering performance of VG. In a very complex scene, the total number of vegetation and buildings may exceed a staggering 1 billion triangles, and may even reach billions. However, thanks to VG's technology, the team only needs to produce high-precision models and can relax a little on the number of faces, allowing the artist to have more room to play.

(VG increases the number of faces a single scene can withstand)

In addition, Huang Jinshou also demonstrated the specific application of VG in "Unlocking Machine" at GDC. Traditional GPU Skinning requires baking actions onto textures, but in this way, action fusion, IK, and RIG action fusion cannot be used. "Unlimited Machine" has relatively high requirements for the expressiveness of movements, so it uses IK Rig action fusion to integrate these functions. In order to solve this problem, the production team decided to upload the data to the GPU memory after completing the bone matrix calculations of these action systems, and perform skinning animation calculations in the GPU. Finally, all the mechas with different types of actions can be rendered on the screen through one DrawCall of VG, so that a single Drawcall can complete the rendering of different types of mechas with different actions.

(Batch rendering, FPS greatly improved)

At the same time, the use of VG can greatly reduce memory usage, without reloading the previous MESH data. In memory, we don't need to store any data about the model. Because VG data can be stored directly in the video memory, this can save a lot of memory space.

(Comparison of memory occupied by original Mesh and VG Meshi)

This VG technology is not only compatible with Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) and universal rendering Pipeline (URP) also supports multi-platform deployment, including PC, Android, iOS, Xbox and PS5, etc. This means that VG can run smoothly on these host platforms and provide users with a consistent high-quality experience.

At the end, Huang Jinshou compared the performance of VG scenes and ordinary scenes. In this scene performance comparison, we can see that the game performance has been significantly improved after using VG. After switching to VG, FPS increased by 43% and 31% respectively. At the same time, the CPU time consumption has also been significantly reduced. This improvement is mainly due to the migration of tasks such as cropping and LOD calculation from the CPU to the GPU. The GPU utilization rate has increased from 70% to 97%, allowing developers to release this part. The CPU computing power is used for game logic and other aspects, instead of letting rendering occupy this precious CPU resource. Overall, the application of VG technology effectively improves game performance and provides developers with more flexibility in resource allocation.

(Comparison of performance data between VG scenes and ordinary scenes)

VG is a brand-new feature of the new engine, which is comparable to the virtual polygons of the most advanced commercial engines. Effect. This sharing about the VG application of Xishanju's "Unlocking Machine" aroused strong interest from foreign developers present. They raised their hands to speak during the question and answer session and asked experts for advice on issues they were concerned about. Their enthusiastic questions not only promoted the industry The exchanges and progress within the company also provide valuable inspiration and motivation for the application of VG technology in games to solve industry problems.

Games are not only a way of entertainment, but also a kind of emotional sustenance. Therefore, Xishanju has been committed to creating game works that can touch people's hearts and bring players the best gaming experience. The application of VG in "Unlimited Machine" can make the world in the game more real, vivid and expressive, making players feel like they are in a fascinating new world, immersed in it, and enjoy a unique and extraordinary game. experience.

As the earliest game R&D manufacturer in China, Xishanju has developed and operated more than dozens of online games. The game product types have evolved from stand-alone games to now involving clients. Online games, mobile games and many other fields. Looking at the global game industry, many companies often choose to carry out horizontal and refined development in a category. "Unlimited Machine", as the first work of Xishanju to start the science fiction track, shows that Xishanju is disrupting innovation and globalization. The strategic determination represents that Xishanju’s diversified layout has never stopped. Through continuous exploration and cultivation of the game culture innovation model, and adhering to the concept of equal emphasis on game quality and heritage, we will continue to lead players to explore unlimited possibilities for the future and create more excellent works together.

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