NVIDIA has released their first consumer grade graphics card based on their new Volta architecture, the Titan V. Priced at $2999, it is a card that is meant to be used primarily for AI and scientific simulation processing. Although this GPU is not meant for gaming, it still runs most modern titles significantly better than the 1080 Ti. We’ve now received the first benchmarks that have been shared by a Redditor.

Keep in mind that these benchmarks aren’t official but it showcases the Titan V tested with  Ashes of the Singularity, Gears of War 4 and UNIGINE’s Superposition benchmark tool. As can be expected of the most powerful GPU in the world right now, it runs these games quite well  running Gears of War4 on Ultra settings at 1440p and managing an average of 158fps. At similar settings, it pushed 88 fps in Ashes of the Singularity. 

It should be exciting to see what NVIDIA’s next high-end card dedicated for gaming will be like since the Titan V itself performs so well. You can check out below screenshots of the benchmark results as well as the aforementioned graph.

So naturally, when you get the chance to talk tok someone from a company like that, you want to ask them everything that you can. And that’s what we did, when we got the chance to engage Brad Wardell of Stardock in an exclusive interview some time ago.

Okay, so to begin with, would you like to introduce yourself for our readers?

Sure, I’m Brad Wardell, I’m the President and CEO of Stardock, we’re located out here in Michigan. And we’ve been in business since the early 1990s,we’re one of the early game development studios still around. We’ve made Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire, Ashes of the Singularity, Offroad Trading Company, and lots of other great stuff.

Well, I just want you to know that Sins of a Solar Empire is a personal favorite game of mine- and I really am hoping for a follow up to that, actually!

Yup, we are too! (laughs)

Ashes of the Singularity has been a massive success for you- what is the future road map looking like for the game? 

In 2017, we’re trying to add a lot of stuff, I would say features that many RTS players would expect in the genre, but features that were pretty hard at first because of the nature of our engine- such as replays, better modding support, new types of units, that kind of stuff.  And we’re starting to try to create other kinds of environments like oceans, so we can eventually have ships and other races, and that kind of thing

So, I know that strategy games are hard to put on systems other than PC- I think Halo Wars is one of the few notable examples of the genre having made the jump successfully. And your games are even more nuanced than the average RTS, they borrow liberally from 4X games. So I guess my question is, are there any odds of Ashes of the Singularitymaking the jump over to consoles? How about the Nitrous Engine [that Stardock has developed, and that Ashes runs on]?

Nitrous will run on consoles, we plan on bringing it over to consoles. Ashes of the Singularity, that would be tough. I remember- you remember when they tried to do Supreme Commander 2 on a console, and the sacrifices they had to make to try to get that to work were pretty tough. But I won’t say never- I just think it depends on how consoles evolve.

"We’re trying to add [to Ashes of the Singularity] a lot of stuff, I would say features that many RTS players would expect in the genre, but features that were pretty hard at first because of the nature of our engine- such as replays, better modding support, new types of units, that kind of stuff."

Okay, so Star Control: Origins- now this one I actually don’t know much about, I know that you’ve announced it for PC and consoles, but we haven’t heard much more about the game. What can you tell us about it, and when can we expect to start hearing more about it? 

Sure, so Star Control was a really popular series back in the early 1990s. And it was one of the few action adventure games- some describe Mass Effect as a remake of Star Control, so to say, where they try to blend RPG and adventure and action all together in a single game. Some years ago, when Atari filed for bankruptcy, we were able to pick up the rights to the Star Controlfranchise, and we decided to make a new one. So a lot of the time since has been spent building up our studio in Maryland, hiring up people who can do right by this reboot. In terms of when people will start hearing more about this? I’d say probably Summer or Early Fall is when we’ll start ramping up. What we don’t want to do is show too much and then people are disappointed- so we want to see we show it in a state so people can really see where we are going.

Yeah, I think there has been an issue with hype cycles of late- I think last year No Man’s Sky was an example of that, where they showed too much too early and ended up overpromising, and people were expecting too much going in. 

Well, that’s really on the developer, right? The developer can control the messaging, what they go and promise. In some ways, Star Control is like a No Man’s Sky kind of game in that you are going out and exploring. So we have to be doubly careful now to make the distinction of, how will Star Control not be like No Man’s Sky? Since you have a ship, you’re going out and meeting aliens, landing on planets, collecting things- and how is that different than No Man’s Sky, and how are we going to avoid the criticisms that game had?

Yeah, that makes sense- and it comes back to you saying you want to show the game when you won’t overpromise.

So is it fair to say you have used Mass Effect as a point of analogy for Star Control? Is this going to be along those lines, or are you looking at it being more like No Man’s Sky, or is this a hybrid?

Well, it’s more along the lines of Star Control itself, the classic games- which means you’re flying a ship and you see it from top down- so it’s not first person. And when you get in the combat, it’s more of an arcade experience of you versus the other ship, which you see from overhead. You can control your ship with special powers, with the gamepad or the keyboard if you’re really old school. Even the map exploration where you land on planets and that sort of thing is designed to feel more like- I’m trying to think of a way to describe this. You’re landing on spherical planets. So the planets are ‘small’. And they are not to scale. So you’re not going to get lost on the planet, but you can explore its entire surface relatively quickly.

So it’s like a modern realization of the overworld abstraction.

Yeah, exactly. The Star Control gameplay is what people loved about the original series along with the amazing writing and the sense of adventure, and also the sense that this was a galaxy or a universe that felt pretty open. It was definitely a good balance between having a direction of what you should be doing but at the same time not putting you on rails.

Right, and we are seeing these days that games that give players agency and the freedom to engage in emergent situations are the ones that end up doing better than ones that insist on railroading players. 

I totally agree.

Well, I wanted to talk about another one of your games- Galactic Civilizations 3 is still receiving updates, your support for the game has been exemplary, I think there was an update last month? And I wanted you to talk about your plans for any further updates for the game.

Well, yeah, we’re actually working on the biggest expansion we have ever made for any game ever as a company, it’s called Galactic Civilizations 3: Crusade. And it’s actually due out early this Spring, we’re getting pretty close to it being done. And in the old days, before digital distribution, this would have been a full fledged sequel, but now thanks to digital distribution we can release it as an expansion instead- but it’s a top to down revisit of the entire game, from diplomacy to how economics work, and how combat is handled, everything. It’s a full blown major change to how the game plays.

"We have to be doubly careful now to make the distinction of, how will Star Control not be like No Man’s Sky? Since you have a ship, you’re going out and meeting aliens, landing on planets, collecting things- and how is that different than No Man’s Sky, and how are we going to avoid the criticisms that game had?"

I suppose this is one of the reasons you have such a vibrant and engaged community, because of your persistent support for your games. 

Oh, thanks! Well, a lot of it is just listening to what the players want, and chew on it for a little bit, think about what things we can or cannot do, what makes sense within the scope of the game- and then try to come up with something that you enjoy as a developer, and what the customer will enjoy as well.

Well, this is actually touching on a question I had- a lot of the times, players have this litany of requests or demands or complaints for a game, what they want to see, and what they think it should be like. And we’ve often seen this, there are cautionary tales, where what players want is not always what’s best for the game- so how do you balance accounting for player feedback, but also not accounting for it so much that it ruins the cohesion of the vision of the game? 

I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule on how to do that- in my experience, I try to listen to what they are looking for, and one of the first questions I have to ask is- is this player really, do they want this game in the first place? Someone who comes in and wants Galactic Civilizations to be a shooter or an arcade action game – like people saying they want to be able to pilot ships around – well, this may not be the game for you. Whereas someone who says something like, ‘when I trade with aliens, I would like to know why they do or do not like the offer I made.’ Well, that’s something I can do something about.

That makes sense, you want to make sure the requests you do account for are within the purview of what the game is. 

Yeah, I mean a lot of times, it’s amazing just- sometimes, someone says, well, when I switch to battle, I want it to switch to a Sins of a Solar Empire mode. And I go, well… you know- maybe that sounds fun, until you realize you have to do like 19 of those a turn.

Yeah, just switch to Sins of a Solar Empire if you want to play Sins of a Solar Empire!

Right- we made a game for that genre.

Yes- and I hope you make another one! 

Well hopefully we’ll have some good things to say in the future!

I wanted to talk to you about virtual reality. I mean, it’s new, I think last year was the first year when we had the three mainstream VR headsets launch- Vive, Rift, PSVR. So far I want to say the uptake on them has been sort of slow, but it’s early days. So I want to know, what do you think about the spread of VR? Will it catch on? What do you think of the tech?

Well there’s a certain- I think that certain things are missing from the hardware that would make it more compelling. Like hand tracking and gesture tracking- I don’t think hand tracking on its own is sufficient to give me a fundamentally different experience. So I’d expect to be able to use my hand at the very least to interact with the world, and I don’t mean using a special controller, I mean track my hands- even if you do want me to wear, I don’t know, gloves. But I don’t even want to wear those, so just hand tracking. So, I’m wearing a headset and then I have to use an Xbox controller, and that does seem to take away from it a bit- because at that point it’s just a really fancy display. So I do think that AR, VR, and even mixed reality are- they’re some day going to become major things in the future. I think we are still at the beginning of that market, though.

"I do think that AR, VR, and even mixed reality are- they’re some day going to become major things in the future. I think we are still at the beginning of that market, though."

So, how far are we from full immersion, like you said. Tracking your body position, so you don’t have to interact with the game using a physical controller, as one example?

That’s- really, there’s two questions there. One is, when will we have the tech- actually, three questions. When will we have the tech to do it, when will we have someone actually do it, and when will we have the software that can deliver that tech? That’s a lot of variables. I would say we could do the tech now if someone designed something like it. The fact that we have something like the Kinect today- the issue is cost. No one wants to spent $3000 on one of these things. It’ll have to wait till tech gets a little bit less expensive, basically.

Software wise, you have Nitrous, which is what powers Ashes of the Singularity and Star Control, and it can do it. it could deliver that experience today. I think it will be some time before Unity or Unreal can do that. Which is another challenge, because in order to make use of this tech you need to have engines that are core neutral. As it stands today, Nitrous is the only core neutral on the market. So it’s a matter of when other engines start releasing core neutral versions on the market, or if there is more adoption of Nitrous.

I did want to ask you about the Nitrous Engine, too- would you say VR has influenced how it has evolved at all? How would you characterize its evolution in the last year or so?

Well, a lot of our focus on Nitrous has been on making the tasks become smaller and smaller. The first thing to understand is what core neutral is- in a typical game, if it’s a modern game – if it’s an old game, it’s only a single thread, and that’s a whole other issue – if it’s a modern game, you’ll have four threads: graphics, gameplay, particles, and the main thread. And something that is build on Nitrous, there is no dedicated thread, and rather it is all tasks. So it doesn’t differentiate between a graphics or AI task. They are all tasks that get sent off to your CPU cores as soon as they come in, and then they can all talk to your graphics adaptor at the same time without any care about what the task is. So a lot of our effort with regards to VR is making those tasks smaller and smaller so that in the future, we can potentially send off those tasks to non connected hardware. So imagine some processing is being done on PC, some on your cellphone, and some on another piece of hardware entirely- and the only way something like that can ever happen is if the tasks get really tiny.

So, you’re trying to basically make individual tasks smaller so they’re easier to handle?

Exactly.

I mean one example of a very badly designed task would be, Task: Render Entire Scene. Right, that’s one task, a giant task, but a task. What you’d want would be something much simpler, like Star Shading Particle, or begin geometry.

So the idea is to have small tasks that are easier to manage as opposed to something that can overwhelm your system.

Exactly.

So I want to tap about Nitrous 2. What are the kinds of improvements it will feature over the original, especially given that you will continue to work on the current Nitrous Engine?

Sure. Nitrous Engine 1 was predicated on your game or application happening on a single machine,, whatever that machine is. Version 2 doesn’t make that assumption. It says now that task can be sent anywhere- to your local CPU core, but one of these tasks could be assigned to a VR set, or some other external piece, where the engine will take the hardware configuration of the other computer, the other core, into account.

So it’s sort of Internet of Things ready?

Uh… I don’t know if I’d use that analogy. It’s more like, the idea is that in the future the tasks that need to be done, you shouldn’t assume will all be done on a single computer. Some day, we’re going to look back on these pictures of us looking at these screens and laugh that we used to talk to dedicated screens. We’ll look at it the same way we look at CRTs today. That’s because in the future, the thing that is doing the computing won’t even be connected to the thing that is doing the computing- they don’t have to be physically connected, as they are today. And the way you get around that is by breaking up your job, whatever it is- even if it’s displaying Skype, you can break it down into tiny tasks that are super lightweight, and have it be done in your glasses, or on some LCD. There’s no brains to it at all. But the way to do that is to break every task into tiny tiny micro tasks that are sent out to a lot of pieces of hardware, and are then put together.

That actually sounds really interesting. It’s a lot like the cloud computing concept, but being done in your vicinity rather than online.

Well, cloud is still kind of monolithic- when people say they are doing something in the cloud, what they’re really saying is that they’re sending data out to a server farm somewhere, in one place, right? But it’s still one place. But that’s why we can’t use the term distributed computing to describe what we are doing, right? We need better terminology. It’s more like discrete- not even that. There would have to be a new term invented for it. But the idea is that what I am doing, part will be done by my mobile, part by my screen, part somewhere else. It’s just- that’s true cloud computing in a sense.

I’d call it piecemeal computing.

Yeah. Unfortunately, cloud computing as a term actually works out well for this, but when we think of the cloud, today, it’s not really a cloud, it’s just remote. My Cloud Drive is not being stored all over the place, it’s being stored in one place, but just being accessed by m remotely.

That makes sense. So do you think there are any applications for this beyond just gaming?

Oh, I think the applications will be primarily non gaming. Think about Skype on a laptop. But imagine five years from now we all have our augmented glasses, and they weigh or look no different than regular glasses, except there’s a tiny, tiny processor on there that’s doing the last step of rendering to display images on your lenses. And it can track your hand so you can manipulate the screen. But the rest of the processing is being done partly on your smartphone, partly on your PC.

So how do you account for latency? Obviously things will have to be wireless-

Well, there’s no latency because your glasses are actually doing the compositing on the fly. It’s not streaming. It’s the computing happening at different rates. Think of it this way, in general computing, only a little bit is actually changing on your screen per frame- and you can do that locally on your glasses, and the bulk of the work can be done wherever else, and then be sent to your glasses.

That’s why I’ve never been big on these streaming technologies- because latency kills it, you have to do the final rendering locally.

Yeah, that’s what I was wondering, it sounds like you have a rather elegant solution around it.

Yeah, I mean, someone is going to do it, our goal is that it will be us. But, it’s how you solve the problem of latency is that you have the last step being rendered locally. That way you skip the latency part. So a video game- most of the rendering job such as models can be done wherever. It’s really the last step on your headset so to speak that needs to be done in real time so you don’t get any latency.

"DirectX 12 and Vulkan are certainly total game changers."

Well, you brought up non gaming applications. Which brings us neatly to my next question. Stardock is releasing software solutions for Windows 10. And there’s this general doom and gloom around the dedicated gaming market as we know it dying out. So what I want to know is, how would you say does your non gaming business model work compared to the gaming business model? Do you think it’s a good complement, or a full on replacement?

I mean, we’ve always made software and games. And I’ve been hearing that dedicated gaming will die since forever. And that’s not going to happen, I don’t even know why people say that. I think we’re moe likely to see the software market die than the gaming market. Because people want to use their devices for entertainment, whether it’s a PC or a Mac or a console. Look at how popular the Nintendo Switch is- there’s a huge market for that. The hard part is making your games be accessible and discoverable by others. Because there are a million games made, how do you stand out?

Okay, so moving back to games- we discussed VR multiple times, and I think Nitrous Engine 2 supports VR, and you have hypothetically discussed how you would tackle VR. Does this mean there are VR games in development right now at your studio?

Yeah, in our case- what we’re doing with Star Control for example is, we’re not gonna go and- I look at VR as, hey, here’s this additional mode, until there is more of a market. We’re not going to dedicate investment on VR only games. But I am happy to support VR since it’s already in our engine. Like, ‘hey, if you have VR, here’s an interesting thing you can do.’ Star Control’s got modding- we want people to be able to create their own universes that they can share online. So one of the things that we have to be able to do, because we are supporting VR anyway, and modding anyway- why not let players be able to do star cartography like they do in Star Trek, where you can just walk around and move start around?

That sounds pretty futuristic too!

Yeah! Plus it might make modding easier for those people because they can kind of walk around their galaxy and get an actual feel for how it’s laid out. Cause that’s one of the problem with making a true 3D galaxy, which the original Star Control actually had- it’s really hard to deal with because you’re on a 2D screen. But in a VR world, that becomes easy to deal with and very interesting.

I wanted to talk about DirectX 12- I think before it launched, there was a lot of hype and talk about it. It was coming after a long time, for a while people had thought that Microsoft had lost interest in developing the DirectX API any further. But it’s launched, and two years later, what are your thoughts on how it has turned out and how it has come along? When do you think will we see more support for it?- right now it’s not doing all that great on that front.

Yeah, that’s a lot of questions. DirectX 12 and Vulkan are certainly total game changers because they allow multiple threads to be talking to GPUs simultaneously. It’s as simple as that. DirectX 11, no matter how fancy your engine was, only one of your threads could talk to the graphics engine at a time. And that was better than DX9, where only one fixed thread could talk to an engine at a time.

But DirectX 12, if I have 8 or 16 cores, and all of them can talk to the engine at once- then that’s a hell of a performance boost. That was actually the reason I got a lot of scepticism about the benchmarks for Ashes of the Singularity, because we came out and said we are seeing a 400% boost in performance on an eight core machine. And when we shipped it, it ended up being even bigger than that. People thought the numbers were crazy, but think about it, they’re not. If in DirectX 11, only one core can talk to the GPU at once, and in DX12, we have eight- your theoretical limit would be eight times a boost. We don’t really get that, but a four times boost is not that crazy then.

So why has support for DX12 and Vulkan been so limited, given how game changing they are?

The biggest reason is documentation. With DX11, there’s lots and lots of books out there for it. DX12 needs a lot more documentation before people will pick it up. The other thing is, people are now using off the shelf parts. And so, that can be tricky because if you have multiple threads talking to the graphics adaptor once, you have to be careful how those threads work, you can’t just- if you have two threads talking at once, your apps will crash. It’s actually quite tricky to do it right. And so because of that, it’s just slow going. I can say that Microsoft is doing some pretty exciting stuff on that end- but whether, in the long term, it’s all going to be DX12 and Vulkan, because you can’t just walk away from something like this. Wait until 16 core CPUs are the norm, if you’re using DX11 at that time still, you might be at 1/10th the speed of a DX12 game. That’s impossible to ignore.

So it will happen eventually, it’s just a matter of time now.

Yeah. And it is difficult, developers will have to get a lot more careful until engines have improved a lot more and Microsoft has documented DX12 more, and there are more books on it… or any books.

Maybe this is my ignorance on the matter, but this reminds me a lot of the issues Sega had with the Saturn with the parallel processing. Theoretically the Saturn was supposed to be more powerful than the PS1, but the idea of having to synch up multiple cores at once, which was something new, was so hard, that most people didn’t even bother and couldn’t get it to work.

It is a little bit similar. The difference is that here, more CPU cores are inevitable. It’s not like there will be a time in the future after which my knowhow is irrelevant, right? Because even if I had become an expert on the Saturn, my knowledge was good only for the Saturn, it would be irrelevant in a few years when its successor came out. So that makes it really hard to invest in learning the idiosyncrasies of that platform. Whereas in the future, if you look at AMD’s Ryzen, they are eight cores. Then one day we will have 16, 24 cores, and it will be some insane number of cores, and we will laugh at being impressed by eight cores like we do at old 10 MHz machines. So this knowhow is always going to be relevant.

You once said that DX12 and Vulkan would be able to render scenes closely resembling ones from movies like Lord of the Rings. I think we’re sort of there, I’m pretty sure we’ll get there eventually-

No, we can totally do it, I’m telling you right now. With our budget, I could totally redo, on a modern PC, I can render the Battle of Helm’s Deep in real time.

So do you think consoles, like PS4 and Xbox One, they have a wider audience- do you think they are holding PC games back?

No, I mean, there are certain limitations you have to work under. There’s what you can do and what is marketable. Ashes the Singularity has sold a lot better than we ever thought it would. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves, it won’t be a top 10 seller any time soon overall, because for it to shine, you need 2GB of VRAm and 8GB of RAM and four CPU cores. And while hardcore gamers have that, it’s still not that common. And in order to do Lord of the Rings in real time, I would need a 16 core machine, 8GB of VRAM, and, say, 16GB of RAM, with either an AMD Vega or GeForce 1080.

"I think, all the guys will end up releasing just a early or bi-yearly upgrades to these things,  like the iPhone, and they’ll all going to end up following the iPhone model, where you must have at least this model for it to work."

And that’s a minuscule fraction of the market.

Exactly. So I could do it, there will be no one to sell it to.

So I guess it’s the idea of a larger audience, not just on consoles, but even within the context of the PC gaming market.

Yeah, and right now, even as is, with Ashes we had to do things that in the short term cost us some things with the presentation. There are things we didn’t want to have to do but had to to hit hardware requirements that would make the game viable. But in the long term, having giant armies of animated creatures for example is inevitable.

I wanted to go back to something you said earlier about fixed hardware for consoles made relevant by their successors. It’s especially interesting, because with the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One Scorpio, it seems like we are now moving to a model where we have rolling updates and continuous hardware platforms instead of discrete generations. Do you think thesis how it will play off from now on, or is this just a one off experiment?

I don’t know, I think it’s- a lot will depend on how savvy the market is. For example, the Xbox One out of the box, the memory speed is not super fast, it doesn’t have any serious dedicated graphics memory. I think it has 32MB of eSRAM in there. The PS4 has 8GB of GDDR5 in there. And so that makes it really hard for the Xbox One to have the same kind of graphics fidelity that the PS4 does right out of the box. Now Scorpio addresses much of that, but the question is, if I have to make my game run on the basic Xbox One, well that’s- how far can the difference in capability be before it’s actually kind of a problem?

That’s actually one of the things I wanted to ask you. I’m sure Microsoft is counting on the scalability of modern game engines and development pipelines, as well as their UWP framework. Now the Xbox One Scorpio is a massive theoretical improvement over the Xbox One- the question is, if Microsoft has mandated that all of their games also need to run on the standard Xbox One, how much difference will we really see in those games running on Scorpio?

That I couldn’t answer, I could only speculate. I think it depends heavily on the game. Certainly, it’s- well, like I said, we come back to graphics memory, in every other way, the Xbox One is so excellent. And then it has that memory speed bottleneck. I don’t know, I think it depends on the game.

I also wanted to ask you about the PS4 Pro, which is a far more moderate upgrade over the PS4 compared to the Scorpio relative to the Xbox One. I think Sony resorts to techniques like Checkerboard rendering to hit 4K- do you think they should have waited a year to release a full fledged 4K machine, instead of the half step we got with the Pro?

I don’t know. I think 4K is becoming pretty common now, but I think when they were starting out, I don’t think any of us expected it to take off quite as much as it did,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s still quite a lot of exciting things waiting- HDR is going to be a big deal. So that’s another thing these guys will all want to support via upgrades in their hardware (and by the way, Nitrous Engine supports HDR, I think we’re the only ones who do). And that’s- it creates a pretty tremendous visual difference. I don’t think that many people have HDR yet, though. So give it another year or two… I think, all the guys will end up releasing just a early or bi-yearly upgrades to these things,  like the iPhone, and they’ll all going to end up following the iPhone model, where you must have at least this model for it to work.

So a rolling generation instead of a discrete one.

Right.

For pushing game development further, for achieving parity with the kinds of advances that we see in the PC market, do you think this moderate rolling model that Sony has with the PS4 Pro better, or are the gigantic leaps, such as the one we see with Scorpio, better?

I think that in the case of- I think both retrying to aim for different things, trying to solve different problems. With Scorpio, Microsoft is trying to, I think they are making a lotto good moves trying to address a lot of the weaknesses of the original Xbox One hardware. The PlayStation 4, it has a little bit different issues traditionally, I find their software environment a little stranger as a PC guy. But their hardware was already in pretty good shape off the bat. They don’t have any- they bit the bullet and put in 8GB of super expensive GDDR5 memory in from the start.

Speaking of those weaknesses, one of the weaknesses of the Xbox One hardware that we have discussed already is the eSRAM. The Scorpio is apparently doing away with this according to recent leaks. If they do do away with that, what kinds of benefits do you think we will get from this?

Well, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s that memory speed issue… on the one hand, it’s a great thing they’re doing it, on the other, it’s that backwards compatibility thing. One has eSRAM, the other does not- then, if I’m a developer, I’m hoping that the OS takes care of that, instead of me having to work separately for each.

I wanted to ask you about- let’s forget the mid generation upgrades. Eventually there will be a full fledged PS5 and Xbox One successor-

You think so?

I hope so! Or will we just be getting rolling upgrades from here on out?

"All the way back to the Gamecube, through to the Wii U, they all iterated on the same hardware under the hood. You can argue that if they do make a Playstation 5, it will be a marketing thing instead of a discrete break in hardware. It’ll still have new hardware, but under the covers it will just be the latest of whatever the hardware it is using now is, instead of entirely new chips."

Well, that seems to be the way everything else is going- the iPhone, iPad, all mobile devices. In a way, that’s what Nintendo has been doing, right? All the way back to the Gamecube, through to the Wii U, they all iterated on the same hardware under the hood. You can argue that if they do make a Playstation 5, it will be a marketing thing instead of a discrete break in hardware. It’ll still have new hardware, but under the covers it will just be the latest of whatever the hardware it is using now is, instead of entirely new chips.

Do you think that whenever this ‘shift’ to PS5 happens, do you think we’ll finally achieve photorealism? In the next generation, the next cycle?

Well, I think we can do it with the current cycle, actually. We can go full realism. I mean, can we get past uncanny valley? Probably not. But when I think photo, I think still images. And we can definitely do that! For one frame- it’s usually the animation or how the light interacts with certain materials that makes you go, ‘this isn’t quite right.’ You know, a lot of it comes down to the engines too. The hardware guys probably shake their fists at the software, because everyone is using these engines nowadays, these off the shelf engines that were written back in the early 2000s. And sure, they’ve iterated, but they’re still based on the assumption that one CPU core is talking to one GPU, for example. They’re not doing- for example, their lighting techniques are very much a video game style lighting technique, and not what you would see in a movie or CGI. But they could- the hardware can. It’s just that the software doesn’t allow them to.

So we’re just waiting for our software engines to catch up t where the hardware already is now.

Right.

In our last interview, you spoke about the potential of cloud gaming, and how theoretically the Xbox One, which was pushing itself on that front, could generate amazing physics and procedurally generated terrain, things like that. Now of course, right now you are speaking more about locally distributed rendering, and Microsoft themselves are not pushing the cloud much anymore, except for Crackdown 3. So I guess, where does this leave traditional cloud gaming, with the server farms handling processing? Is there any immediate future for it?

In the immediate future? Well, it’s always the difference between what is marketable and what is possible. I’m actually surprised more people haven’t done it, but on the other hand, the cloud computing assets available to use tend to be a lot more expensive than what I would have expected. Know that we do some cloud computing with our games, and it’s proven- the services, I won’t go into them, but they’ve all seen costs way more than we would have expected. So that’s one of the things we didn’t realize- let me walk you through what I mean by that.

Let’s say you buy a game, you buy it on your computer. Playing it on your computer has no ongoing costs to the developer or publisher, right? Let’s say you play the new Zelda game, it doesn’t cost Nintendo any money when you play that, right? But in the cloud computing world, if you’re playing that Zelda game, and they create this really sophisticated virtual world full of stuff, and streaming it to you, you playing that game actually costs them money. I still think there’s a market for that, but the costs of doing that need to go way down. I mean, it’s orders of magnitude more than what I would have expected it to be.

So I guess the difference is between having a one time sunk cost, versus having a one time sunk cost AND an additional persistent cost with cloud computing.

Exactly, and I think that’s- I think most of us on the tech side are excited about the cloud computing stuff, but anyone who looks at the costs goes, ‘Oh my god, this is really expensive!’ And that was one of the big shocks to us, it was a sticker shock, of just how much we got charged for doing stuff on the cloud.

I mean, yes, I suppose eventually you will go towards whatever is most cost efficient.

Yup. If I make my mind, I want to be able to sell it, and not have to lose money every time someone plays it, that makes  a very perverse incentive. You don’t want to create a game where you say, ‘please buy my game! But don’t play it.’ <laughs>

I wanted to ask you about Vulkan. I know we discussed it earlier when we chatted about DX12. But speaking specifically about Vulkan, how do you think it’s coming along? Can it keep up with the larger brand that is DX12?

Well, Vulkan has a lot of people behind it. It runs on Windows 7- which won’t be an issue in the long term, but in the short term it’s super valuable. But I think the single biggest advantage it has now is that there are a lot of people writing a lot of documentation for it. A lot of- so, in the long run, if you want people to use your platform, whatever it is, there need to be ways for people to do it. And because there are so many people behind Vulkan and so many companies that want it to succeed, they have an incentive to go and make tat documentation happen.

So, I think Cloud Imperium Games announced recently that Star Citizen will be ditching DX12 and focus only on Vulkan. Do you think they are limiting their audience by doing this?

I don’t know, I think it depends on how the- how performance works out for them. It’s gonna be interesting to see, because on one hand, Microsoft has a vested interest to see… if you’re making a PC only game, Vulkan is probably a little more, I don’t see Vulkan picking up support if you want to develop on Xbox One. So if you’re making a game you have on Xbox, then DX12 makes a lot more sense. If you’re making a PC only game, then it’s a lot more even, right? So then it comes down to performance, stability, and that sort of thing. I think in terms of Cloud Imperium, a lot of it might simply come down to what engine they are using under the covers.

We also discussed- this was something we touched upon before, that was AMD and their upcoming line of CPUs and GPUs. Now, Nvidia recently launched the GTX 1080ti. Do you think that can keep up with the AMD Vega line? Or do you think it’s more cost effective, cost efficient? Which one do you prefer more?

Oh that’s a tough call. I use AMD hardware myself on the GPU see for sure. Ryzen is still so new, I don’t even think we have access to it yet. I’m a weirdo in the sense that- I don’t need the very fastest video card with my machine. I’m a little more sensitive to, and this is silly, how easy it is to install, or I like my computers to be portable and carry around. I really like the AMD cards, especially the newer ones. The 460, I know it’s not that sexy, but if you’ve ever seen a picture of it, it’s like, ‘oh my god, this is the greatest thing ever, it’s tiny!’ And there’s something to be said for that- at a certain point, I don’t care for 200fps in Battlefield versus 130fps and being able to carry- there’s a certain point where, once you hit this performance threshold, I care about costs and portability, and weight. Just convenience in general. I don’t think a lot of these guys understand that. I read these benchmarks, and no one understands that these cards have an external water cooler on them, which is a pain in the butt to even install. And there is something to be said for a card that doesn’t require all that.

Now I really like the Nvidia 1080, because it does not have that water cooler. So that’s pretty nice. But then you ave the 460, I’m not even talking about 480, the 460 is this itty bitty card, and I can throw it in there, and get some good performance.

"Nintendo doesn’t arguably need third party. You think about the Mario games, Zelda, I mean, there’s plenty there."

So it comes down to a point of relative diminishing returns at some point.

Exactly.

Now this is again something you’ve brought up quite a bit through our chat, and that is the Nintendo Switch. Now, the Switch is not going after PS4 and Xbox One, and Nintendo has arguably the biggest game of all time with Breath of the Wild– but I mean, you are a studio that pushes technology. You like pushing boundaries with technology. What is your take on the Switch hardware? Is that something you can ever feasibly support?

No, probably not. It’s too different than any of the others, and there isn’t a lot of- I haven’t seen a lot of third party success stories on the more recent Nintendo hardware. Nintendo, is a great market for Nintendo, but I haven’t seen a lot of huge hits made by non Nintendo studios.

So do you think that in an era where third party games and support are so integral to success, do you think the Switch has a future in the market?

Oh, I do. Yeah, I mean- Nintendo doesn’t arguably need third party. You think about the Mario games, Zelda, I mean, there’s plenty there. I mean, if it was a $1000 game system, maybe I’d care. But as it stands now, there is plenty to play with on the Switch, that’s just fine.

Okay. And I suppose I also wanted to talk to you about the Xbox One, Microsoft made quite a few stumbles coming in, and not jut with the hardware, but also with their messaging-

You mean it’s not for watching sports? <laughs>

<laughs> but yeah, what I want to know is, with Microsoft course correcting their entire strategy, with he Scorpio coming up, do you think they have potential for greater success than they have had so far?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Xbox One has been very successful, it’s a very good console. All of the are frankly just so good. I’m ver happy the fact that they all have so many CPU cores for example is just a lot of potential for growth for the future. and 8GB of memory is very good too. Now the only thing I wish Microsoft would have done would have been to make that 8GB DDR5- which they may be doing with the Scorpio. And at that point, it’ll be years before the software catches up, so they’ll be fine.

I hope all three find success in the market, I think we need all three.

Oh, I agree.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time out to talk to us!

Thank you, it was my pleasure!

DirectX 12 and Vulkan are supposed to be the wave of the future for PC gaming- that’s what we’ve been told. But while the two APIs continue to be engaged in a fierce battle for supremacy, uptake on them by most developers has been… slow, to put it bluntly.

So when we had the chance to speak with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock – who you may remember as one of the most vocal proponents of DirectX 12 – we made sure to ask him why developers aren’t using it and Vulkan all that well. According to Wardell, the lack of support right now comes down to the newness of both APIs, and the ensuing lack of documentation on properly exploiting them- but for both of them, widespread adoption is only a matter of time.

“DirectX 12 and Vulkan are certainly total game changers because they allow multiple threads to be talking to GPUs simultaneously,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. DirectX 11, no matter how fancy your engine was, only one of your threads could talk to the graphics engine at a time. And that was better than DX9, where only one fixed thread could talk to an engine at a time.

“But DirectX 12, if I have 8 or 16 cores, and all of them can talk to the engine at once- then that’s a hell of a performance boost. That was actually the reason I got a lot of scepticism about the benchmarks for Ashes of the Singularity, because we came out and said we are seeing a 400% boost in performance on an eight core machine. And when we shipped it, it ended up being even bigger than that. People thought the numbers were crazy, but think about it, they’re not. If in DirectX 11, only one core can talk to the GPU at once, and in DX12, we have eight- your theoretical limit would be eight times a boost. We don’t really get that, but a four times boost is not that crazy then.

Given how game changing these two are, the only reason they are not being supported right now is a lack of documentation, according to Wardell.

“The biggest reason is documentation. With DX11, there’s lots and lots of books out there for it. DX12 needs a lot more documentation before people will pick it up. The other thing is, people are now using off the shelf parts. And so, that can be tricky because if you have multiple threads talking to the graphics adaptor once, you have to be careful how those threads work, you can’t just- if you have two threads talking at once, your apps will crash. It’s actually quite tricky to do it right. And so because of that, it’s just slow going. I can say that Microsoft is doing some pretty exciting stuff on that end- but whether, in the long term, it’s all going to be DX12 and Vulkan, because you can’t just walk away from something like this. Wait until 16 core CPUs are the norm, if you’re using DX11 at that time still, you might be at 1/10th the speed of a DX12 game. That’s impossible to ignore.”

Given that multi-core CPUs are a wave of the future, and something that are only going to get more and more prevalent across all product categories as time goes on, it is only a matter of time before developers have to contend with programming for them. Given that, Wardell may be right- it will only be a matter of time before they are forced to come to terms with either DirectX 12, or Vulkan, or both.

One of the big anti climaxes of this generation was the cloud- cloud powered gaming would be, we were told, the future, allowing for new, dynamic, emergent gameplay experiences that would never have n=been possible otherwise. Microsoft especially pushed for the potential of cloud gaming extremely hard at the beginning of the generation, claiming that its potential would more than compensate for the power difference that the Xbox One and PS4 have.

Spoilers- none of that happened (except, may be Crackdown 3). The utilization of cloud gaming remained minimal at best, the PS4 remained the more powerful console (Microsoft is now releasing entirely new hardware, the Xbox Scorpio, to counteract this), and all the proselytizing about the power of the cloud has come to nothing.

One of the people who truly believed in the power of the cloud was the CEO of Stardock, Brad Wardell, he had noted its potential for games. So when we got the chance to chat with him again, we asked him about the apparent abandonment of cloud gaming, Crackdown 3 aside. Why does he think this happened? And according to him, does cloud gaming still even have a future?

“In the immediate future? Well, it’s always the difference between what is marketable and what is possible,” Wardell said. “I’m actually surprised more people haven’t done it, but on the other hand, the cloud computing assets available to use tend to be a lot more expensive than what I would have expected. Know that we do some cloud computing with our games, and it’s proven- the services, I won’t go into them, but they’ve all seen costs way more than we would have expected. So that’s one of the things we didn’t realize- let me walk you through what I mean by that.

“Let’s say you buy a game, you buy it on your computer. Playing it on your computer has no ongoing costs to the developer or publisher, right? Let’s say you play the new Zelda game, it doesn’t cost Nintendo any money when you play that, right? But in the cloud computing world, if you’re playing that Zelda game, and they create this really sophisticated virtual world full of stuff, and streaming it to you, you playing that game actually costs them money. I still think there’s a market for that, but the costs of doing that need to go way down. I mean, it’s orders of magnitude more than what I would have expected it to be.

The difference, then, comes down to the difference between having a one time sunk cost on development (that you can make back with sales of the game), versus having a one time sunk cost on development with ongoing maintenance costs on top of that.

“Exactly, and I think that’s- I think most of us on the tech side are excited about the cloud computing stuff, but anyone who looks at the costs goes, ‘This is really expensive!’ And that was one of the big shocks to us, it was a sticker shock, of just how much we got charged for doing stuff on the cloud.”

So ultimately, like so much else, it comes down to the economics of the situation- if cloud is the future, it needs to be cheaper before developers flock to it. In a sense, this is like the problem that VR (another emergent technology we were promised would be the ‘future’) faces, except for developers- as long as the costs aren’t accessible, people simply are not going to care.

Real time strategy games have so far been the purview almost exclusively of gaming PCs. They’re just really hard to get right on consoles- ask Microsoft, who have now tried twice with Halo Wars and Halo Wars 2. Especially for someone like Stardock, whose games are even more nuanced and complex than the average strategy game, and borrow liberally from 4X strategy titles, it’s hard to imagine those working on PS4 and Xbox One.

But when we sat down with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, for a chat, we did decide to ask him what the odds of seeing a console Ashes of the Singularity port were- yes, a lot is stacked against that ever happening, but has the company completely ruled it out yet? What about the company’s excellent Nitrous Engine?

“Nitrous will run on consoles, we plan on bringing it over to consoles,” Wardell said. “Ashes of the Singularity, that would be tough. I remember- you remember when they tried to do Supreme Commander 2 on a console, and the sacrifices they had to make to try to get that to work were pretty tough. But I won’t say never- I just think it depends on how consoles evolve.”

That said, even without a console port planned any time soon, it looks like the future is bright for Ashes of the Singularity. “In 2017, we’re trying to add a lot of stuff, I would say features that many RTS players would expect in the genre, but features that were pretty hard at first because of the nature of our engine- such as replays, better modding support, new types of units, that kind of stuff.  And we’re starting to try to create other kinds of environments like oceans, so we can eventually have ships and other races, and that kind of thing.”

So, you may not be playing this with a controller any time soon (honestly, that’s a good thing)- but the game will be growing and evolving in a major way this year. I think that should make all fans of Ashes of the Singularity happy.

"Ashes of the Singularity may encourage you to build a vast army of units to overcome your enemy but it’s focus is on tactics and long-term strategy."

Those answers are unfortunately not provided by the Campaign labeled “Episode 1: Imminent Crisis”. It’s the future (naturally) and two factions are at war – Post-Human Coalition with its array of meat-bags and the Substrate, an intelligent machine race answering to a single AI. Both factions are fighting over Turinium, a valuable resource that is the key to building your vast swathes of units. Compared to memorable stories like Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, the campaign in Ashes of the Singularity serves as little more than a soft entry-point into the genre’s mechanics and overall gameplay. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you, but it could have easily done with a lot more character and plot development over the barebones story-telling that is there.

Ashes of the Singularity may encourage you to build a vast army of units to overcome your enemy but it’s focus is on tactics and long-term strategy. Numerous units can be grouped together into Meta-Units, armies that behave intelligently but allow for easy macro-management. Units will protect each other while advancing on the enemy and it only pushes for more precision-based movement as you manage various army comps. Along with the smaller, squishier units you have your Carriers and the Dreadnoughts. The Dreadnoughts are special because they can attain Veterancy, which means they can be upgraded and gain special abilities. These allow it to either more effectively support your smaller units or put more hurt on vast numbers of enemies. Either way, it’s important to keep your Dreadnoughts alive and earning experience – they’re more potent in the long game.

While the lack of unit variety is a problem – and the similarity between units on both sides doesn’t really help (though Post-Humans have higher survivability as opposed to the Substrate’s faster mobility and recharging shields) – it does create a tighter focus on managing tactics with the units you do have. Arguments can be made for both sides and hopefully, there’s a larger variety of units planned for the future, just to allow strategy veterans more interesting ways to play. At least the tactical camera looks good and responds well to switching between various Meta-Units and managing various battles at once.

"Rolling through the battlefield with a thousand-strong (and growing) army, Ashes of the Singularity is the very embodiment of its large scale warfare."

Other ways Ashes emphasizes strategy is in being the right place, at the right time. With the ability to create counter-units, your army will be fighting over control nodes and harvesting Turinium as opposed to simply hanging back and waiting for the enemy to rush. That being said, while the greater emphasis on tactics can often result in pitched battles, a superior force will often win the day. When you have a control node on your side, it can be hard for the enemy to make a comeback even with more expensive options like air units (countered by anti-air measures), orbital lasers  and whatnot. Distilled down, Ashes of the Singularity can often feel simplistic the further you go along. It’s that simplicity which will wear on new players after a while as well.

The other issue is the game’s visuals. Rolling through the battlefield with a thousand-strong (and growing) army, Ashes of the Singularity is the very embodiment of its large scale warfare. Various units are uniquely designed and the smorgasbord of particle effects, explosives, Dreadnoughts battling and little tanks flitting around can be mesmerizing to watch at times. Except it’s outlined against a dreary environment that’s hardly memorable, much less appealing enough on its own. I know, I know, the focus is squarely on the battles here but it just doesn’t help the conflicts themselves if they take place in such generic locations (the snowy levels are admittedly decent looking but that’s it). At least performance-wise the game runs great. Despite running with an Intel Core i5-4440 and GeForce GTX 770, the massive conflicts fly by in beautiful fashion. Now if only they didn’t take place across as dreary a canvas as this.

Multiplayer is pretty strong in Ashes of the Singularity. The large-scale tactics opera plays out in grand fashion against real opponents and it’s here that controlling the nodes while carefully planning out your next move is vital. The stronger army may emerge the victor but it’s the smarter army that can trump it more often than not. Sitting back and weathering attacks is all well and good but you’re encouraged to explore the map, harness Turinium and fight the enemy whenever possible. It’s here that you actually feel like you’re fighting multiple battles on a progressing warfront as opposed to a few sketchy battles here and there.

"And for all the hype about the visuals, despite strong performance, Ashes of the Singularity isn’t the most cutting edge experience on the market."

Ashes of the Singularity may look ambitious but it’s fairly simple and in some ways, fairly safe in its execution. The forgettable campaign serves as little more than a primer which strategy fans can safely skip and the lack of a compelling story doesn’t help matters. A tactics-filled battlefield and unique mechanics like Veterancy and Meta-Units can’t hide the relative similarity between the factions or the lack of unit variety. Multiplayer can be fun and is the real end-game here but it doesn’t nearly have the legs that other real-time strategy titles like Total War or Homeworld would.

And for all the hype about the visuals, despite strong performance, Ashes of the Singularity isn’t the most cutting edge experience on the market. Unless you’re a sucker for huge armies battling it out in grand fashion (and honestly, that’s a visual spectacle unto itself). All of this doesn’t make the game inherently bad – in fact, if you’re new to real time strategy games, it can be fun. But spending enough time with Ashes only drives home its lack of long-lasting appeal all the more. If you’re looking for an extensive skirmish or two with less emphasis on resource management and more on battling, then Ashes of the Singularity makes for a good distraction until, say, Total War: Warhammer or the next Supreme Commander rolls around.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

"We’ve had a very good results with DX12. We’re pretty far along with our Vulcan support. We’re phasing out the Mantle and phasing in the Vulcan. We don’t have it working yet because the spec isn’t quite in provisional yet. It will be soon."

Ravi: Can you tell us a bit about yourselves and Oxide Games; and how you started it; and how you first got into games development?

Dev Team: That can be a long story. (Laughing) The founding members of Oxide. We’ve all been in the industry for a really long time now. Probably been in the games industry 20 plus years. We’ve all been developing software for a really long time. Did a bunch of different stuff. During the course of our careers we met each other along the way. At the end of it we all wound up at Firaxis.

Ravi: Yeah, Sid Meier’s studio.

Dev Team: Right. We wanted to try out some new, riskier things and that’s difficult to do in a publicly owned company. That’s why we decided to form Oxide Games and take some risks on what we thought would be disruptive game technology that we could tie in with multi-core, next-gen API.

Ravi: Nitrous is the key thing here because Ashes of the Singularity is on it. When you first announced it, it caused that “disruption” you’re talking about. It’s been some time since the announcement. What sort of changes have you made to the engine over the years?

Dev Team: Whenever you’re building new technology you start with a problem. And a theory on how to solve that problem. You put that solution into practice and see what problems that solution caused. etcetera, etcetera. That’s where we started. We had a lot of ideas on how we’d utilize multi-core. We had a lot of ideas on how we could tie that into both gameplay and graphics for next gen APIs. What we’ve been doing since then is a refinement. The biggest thing we’ve noticed is that everything matters. We found ourselves changing in terms of synchronization, and that can really destroy a multi-core engine. Our interest isn’t just frame rate, but fast to get into it. Last night I tested it. From launch to the executable when the main movie plays its 7 seconds on DirectX12 its 4 on DirectX 11. And that’s to load the entire content of the game. That was a theory we had about synchronize loading and how we form out the loading system to a variety of different cores. We refined that overtime. We do a lot of work with different performance tools. We try to study the frame. One thing we focus on is we don’t just assume there’s a problem we try to track it down and make sure it’s the problem before we try and solve it.

Ravi: When you first introduced Nitrous you were one of the biggest supporters of AMD’s mantle API. Has the tech been converted into a universal API which is the Vulcan API? Given that you are supporting Vulcan has this made the Nitrous Engine a platform agnostic engine of sorts, which gives better compatibility across several devices and consoles?

Dev Team: I would say that probably true. We’ve had a very good results with DX12. We’re pretty far along with our Vulcan support. We’re phasing out the Mantle and phasing in the Vulcan. We don’t have it working yet because the spec isn’t quite in provisional yet. It will be soon. We’ve been spending out time trying to get early access out. We believe by sometime next year we’ll be showing off Vulcan. All indications are indicating that our engine is well build around next generation technologies. When the new APIs come, everyone’s got these new technician costs. DX11 comes out and everyone has DX9. But we’ve already found all that tech transition. We’ve paid that cost. They’re all completely next generation on everything. Adopting Mantle early has given us an edge. We’ve already mapped out a lot of the models for next gen API. We have baselines; we know how fast things should be. When Mantle was new and being accepted, no one know what the results of that were going to be. Everyone had well informed ideas but no one actually sat down and proved how well it could work out. By adopting Mantle early, it’s made out transition to DirectX 12 a lot easier. We’re confident that those platforms are going to work out really well. For us.

"We built Nitrous. We didn’t just build an engine and say “we’re going to go out and compete with Unity and Unreal.” We built Nitrous because Unreal and Unity could not handle the type of games we wanted to make."

Ravi: One thing that’s defined Ashes of the Singularity is that it’s one of the first games that will utilize DirectX 12 — it’s been built for it. What kind of benefits has this resulted in when used in conjunction with the Nitrous Engine?

Dev Team: There are lots of benefits. The direct control is really big. We can guarantee smoothness and get rid of hitches and do synchronization. DX11 has a lot of bugs even after we send our game in. DX12 is so much cleaner. We all this performability early on in it. When we shipped DX11 5 years ago, with Civ 5, those drivers were a mess. The fact that DX12 is working this well so early bodes well for them. A lot of the problems we were just anticipating would just go away.

There are a few things we’ve been able to embrace: object space, lighting. If you look at the next gen API they are what really make those technologies feasible. Both of them require increased draw count. If you look at it in DirectX 11 it was a very batched limited API. Two of the fundamental technologies we developed and embraced both the temporal anti-aliasing and the object space lighting require a significant increase in the number of batches that can be submitted to the GPU. Without that we would be more limited. If you look at Nvidia’s DirectX 11 driver performance, they’ve gotten what I would consider stellar results out of that. DirectX 12 should result in more stable game releases.

Ravi: When you consider that Nitrous has gone to that point where it’s going onto multiple platforms, and it has that compatibility — right now it’s only announced for the PC platform and given that it is compatible with the PS4 and Xbox One are there any plans to bring it to consoles? Is there anything stopping you from current-gen consoles?

Dev Team: No. We’ve worked really well on current-gen consoles. It’s strictly just what games we’re working on and what our customers are wanting us to ship from right now. It’s well suited for consoles.

Ravi: The game is going into early access in October 22. Besides gameplay feedback what is your current aim, what kind of data are you looking for? Say, for optimizing it across multiple GPUs for DirectX12 benchmarks and such.

Dev Team: We did our tuned benchmark back in August and this one isn’t set up for bench marking. We’re looking more for compatibility, troubleshooting stuff. We haven’t done an enormous amount of tuning for the GPUs and probably isn’t as useful for benchmarking. We want to make sure we can run on a wide variety of — especially — lower-end hardware. We should be able to run and scale down on mobile parts and integrated graphics. From a technical stand point, make sure we edit the tech settings appropriately. We want a lot of feedback with the DX12 to make sure everything is working correctly.

Ravi: With regards to licensing the Nitrous engine. There’s been this thing in the past– this year actually: Unreal Engine 4 has gone free. Unity 5 also went free. How have these announcements affected your plans for licensing?

Dev Team: Two things about licensing. We built Nitrous. We didn’t just build an engine and say “we’re going to go out and compete with Unity and Unreal.” We built Nitrous because Unreal and Unity could not handle the type of games we wanted to make. We built Nitrous for the types of games Oxide wants to make. As for our plans for licensing, I don’t think we’re ready to announce that.

When we built Nitrous, our goal wasn’t to compete with Unity and Epic. The goal was we saw a serious of problems in the gaming space that we wanted to try and solve. Mainly that games were limited on their scope, their complexity. When you look at Unity and Epic those engines are really good content play back–especially sandbox games. Those engines aren’t very good at that. Nitrous is the opposite philosophy. It’s designed for more simulation, broad scope, and huge non-stop stuff going on.

We haven’t worried about competing in terms of price. If those guys want to fight it out to see who can be the most “free,” they’re more than welcome to do that. If you look at it, Unreal takes 5 percent on the back-end, and Unity takes a fair bit on the back-end.

People say it’s a fair bit, but it’s gross. It’s not that different from the previous model. They sort of changed which side they did that math on. They’re both fighting over certain developers. I think we’re in a different space entirely. They’re welcome to do what they want in the marketplace. It’s not much of an issue for us.

"When you try to get a game down into the 16 milliseconds consistently, it’s amazing how those milliseconds add up. Going to 30 frames per second is like gaining those extra milliseconds really is huge in terms of flexibility you’ve got there. It’s very difficult."

Ravi: In the past oxide games has claimed that DirectX 12 will improve visuals and this has become apparent on the PC. But DirectX 12 will also be coming to the Xbox One. As far as we know the Xbox One already has an API library which is similar to DirectX 12. Do you think this could be improved further when DirectX 12 actually arrives on the console?

Dev Team: We’re not experts on the Xbox One, but I can tell you what my understanding is. There are two benefits with DirectX 12 that are performance related. It’s a lot lower CPU overhead. That’s important because the CPUs on the consoles are not powerful. You have many of them but each one is not powerful. You’ll get a huge CPS benefit if you were having trouble with that by using DirectX 12. The other thing that DirectX 12 really does it offers more support for advanced GPU features. And there’s not a great way of doing that at all on DX11. By enabling that on Xbox One you can get pretty big (word sounds like per, or perf? Can’t understand) improvements on consoles. There should be tangible benefits. It will take people a few years to acclimatize to how to program and get those benefits.

Ravi: Like you said, it reduces CPU overhead. Can this, for Xbox One in the long run, can it result in games pushing out more pixels or a better resolution or better FPS?

Dev Team: Sure. If you use synchronous compute feature, if you optimize your research transition barriers that you have direct control over for DirectX, there are things you can do that you have no way to analog in DX11. There’s potential for substantial performance improvements which could manifest in increased resolution and frame rate.

There’s also additional benefit for developers to invest in trying to really pull the most that they can out. So they can bring that directly back to the PC. Because if you have to build two different paths you have to optimize one over the other. That’s as much a budget and a resource issue as anything else. It certainly is going to encourage people to invest more in that technology.

Ravi: Microsoft is working on– they’re trying to make Windows 10 a singular platform across every system, with Xbox One having that along with the PC having that as well. They’re encouraging a lot of cross platform compatibility between it. Do you think this kind of feedback that comes back and forth between developing on Xbox One and on PC, is it like a mutual benefit between the two platforms? This kind of work that’s being done.

Dev Team: Yeah. I think it is. It’s certainly very attractive for a developer to have to have a unified platform. To be able to code on DirectX 12 and be on the PC and then put it on the Xbox with minimal changes is hugely beneficial. It definitely homogenize their platform. Instead of Xbox One as a separate platform and Windows 10 as a separate platform, now you just have Microsoft as one platform and that’s clearly a lot simpler.

Ravi: One thing that’s been a major issues with the current gen consoles since they were announced– it’s been a PC issue since the beginning of time — from a developer’s perspective, 1080p at 60 frames per second: why do you think that isn’t a norm for this generation as such? Because when we looked back at the beginning there was all this hype that the new consoles would be capable of this and since then it’s like not many developers have been able to deliver on those promises, per se. Why do you think it’s been a struggle to balance between frame rate and resolution?

Dev Team: It’s simple math. Last generation consoles and this generation, I think the number I heard quoted was it was 6 times more powerful. That’s great, right? Then you do the math. You realize that if you’re running at 720p and going to 1080p you’ve doubled the number of pixels. If you were running 30 frames a second at 720 and you doubled your pixels and wanted to double your frame rate, you just used 4 more per and you have no more perf. Then you additionally want to increase the fidelity. You’ll see the same thing on 4k. It has 4 times the pixels as 1080. You need a GPU 4 times as powerful just to do the same thing you did before just at a higher resolution level with most engines. With Nitrous you actually don’t. That’s probably why you haven’t seen the big jump that some people were expecting.

It also takes increased bandwidth, etc. etc. When you try to get a game down into the 16 milliseconds consistently, it’s amazing how those milliseconds add up. Going to 30 frames per second is like gaining those extra milliseconds really is huge in terms of flexibility you’ve got there. It’s very difficult. Every game generation you want to do something a little more ambitious. And to pack additional graphics plus additional AI, plus additional gameplay and everything else into 16 milliseconds can be really, really challenging. Especially when trying to do that consistently. The last thing you want to do is stutter between 60 frames per second and 30. You don’t want to jump back and forth there a whole lot. There’s a lot of people that will argue the development cost and the discipline it takes to make a game run consistently at 16 milliseconds is just very difficult to achieve.

There are other things you can say too. As resolution increases the computational cost increases. I think we’re one of the only engines out there that have been reinvestigating how you render a frame. To some extent, as the resolution increases, not only is there a cost of more pixels but those pixels are being faded in a very simple manner. As we scale up in resolution how can we change our rendering so it’s less expensive? Because we’re doing the object space lighting we actually would scale better as the resolution increases. If you run our games at 4K, a lot of engines are 3 or 4 times slower we’re like less than half speed.

"To some extent whenever you’ve got something new like DirectX 12, you need people to pioneer the way. Once they prove that it works then you start to see a greater adoption. It’s an exponential growth. Somebody’s got to start somewhere."

Ravi: When it came to optimizing Nitrous for PS4 and Xbox One, both consoles have a similar architecture. They’re both AMD based per se. Did you see any major differences in how the memory works or the number or GPU or ROPs and such?

Dev Team: I don’t think we can talk about differences that we can see. It’s not clear what part of that is for NDA and what part isn’t.

Ravi: The overall differences between the two APIs on both consoles and which one is easier to work with.

Dev Team: I think the PS4 has a pretty nice API. The PS3 had this thing called the GCN. They did something similar for PS4. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s pretty good.

Ravi: Given that you have a close relationship with Microsoft with DirectX 12 and such, what are your thoughts on the adoption rates on the API and the feedback that you’re getting back from developers that have used it so far?

Dev Team: We have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. I actually worked on DirectX years ago, so I know those guys personally. We gave Microsoft out entire mantle station and said, “have at it.” We worked back and forth with them for a year. They helped us a lot with the initial implication. We’ve learned a lot. The difference between DX12 and the previous API is that the previous API was designed by Microsoft and they threw it over the fence and hoped it worked. This time around we actually had everything working and prototyped before the API was finalized. We’re pretty sure that everything works great. That’s a huge change in previous ones. Consumer adoption seems pretty positive. DX12 works with a vast majority of GPUs. We’re not at a point yet where we would drop our DX11 support. We wish we could. Wish we could because we can’t completely take advantage of all of DX12 until we kill our DX11 version. We’re pretty happy with the adoption.

To some extent whenever you’ve got something new like DirectX 12, you need people to pioneer the way. Once they prove that it works then you start to see a greater adoption. It’s an exponential growth. Somebody’s got to start somewhere. I’m really glad we’ve got such a good working relationship with Microsoft and Nvidia and AMD because trying to pioneer a new engine on top of a brand new graphics API and a brand new OS is definitely challenging for everyone involved.

Ravi: In our last interview with Brad, he was talking about how Sony was considering opting for Vulcan on thePS4. What kind of advantages do you think this opens up in general to regards to the Nitrous engine?

Dev Team: From our standpoint, writing a back-end for PS4 is a few months cost and then we’re done. I think it’s a better move for Sony because that means people can invest money in API and it will work everywhere. It will be a lot easier for them to put their code onto.

Ravi: As regarding the GPGPU on both consoles using the Nitrous engine, the PS4 has wider computer for that and get more utilization out of the ALU. What’s your philosophy is on the GRGPU on the Xbox One and PS4. What’s your take?

Dev Team: The PS4 has more synchronous compute queues which could allow you to develop more dependency with gameplay. You could preempt work. I know I could give you a better answer — but I can’t.

"We really want to get those most of what we can out of your systems. We’ve been working hard to do that. It’s one of those things where the hardware guys need developers to produce content that utilizes it."

Ravi: That’s perfectly fine. The PS4 GPU is a step above the Xbox One’s. As you were saying earlier, you don’t have too much trouble when you’re scaling down the Nitrous engine to these different platforms. When you consider the GPU differences, how do you approach this situation? Are you able to scale accordingly to the hardware? Do you go for that or do you try to stick to the lowest common denominator?

Dev Team: We have this problem way more on consoles because we’re PC focused. PS4 and Xbox One are relatively in the same ballpark in performance. There are some differences. With PC space we have to 10x scale not like 30-40 percent type of thing. Our engine is built for integrated graphics. We’re going up to a Furry or a Titan. We have all sorts of knobs we can turn up and down. A lot of them are subtle. You may not notice a GPU that’s a little bit slower. Like 20-30 percent. I don’t know if you’d notice if one is that slower. The average person probably wouldn’t see that too much. We can hide that pretty well.

It goes back into investing in different rendering technologies. The object space lighting stuff is very ALU efficient. Because of that we got a ride range of stuff there that we can do. It’s also resolution independent. If you’re computer ALU bound we can change how much of the scene is shaded at what rate. Where as, say you’re triangle bound we can change the TXAA settings to get different settings there. We have a lot of different knobs use to control that. Most traditional renderers are fixed. You’ve got ‘low,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘high.’ It’s very difficult for them to scale because resolution is going to cut into them. There are a lot of things that hamstring them. Where as we have a lot more freedom to embrace whatever the hardware strengths are.

Ravi: As you said, you’re a PC focused studio and one of the main concerns that’s been coming out the various bottlenecks that have been coming between components. One of the main things we’re wondering is that GPUs and APIs they’ve been progressing at a very fast rate compared to CPUs and memory speed. Are there concerns about bottlenecks in the future in regards to CPUs and memory speeds? And why do you think the industry is not quite working towards making those CPUs faster, where as they’re working more on the GPUs and progressive APIs?

Dev Team: The main problem is chicken and egg. We’ve been told that the hardware guys don’t see scaling. No one’s using all four cores. And a lot of that is the API. They can’t make a single core much faster. But they can add more cores. But they don’t want to add more cores because the games are easier. So we’re in this sort of nasty pattern.

It’s a great question. We’ve been looking at this a lot. We’d be labeled hardware enthusiasts as well as developers. We really want to get those most of what we can out of your systems. We’ve been working hard to do that. It’s one of those things where the hardware guys need developers to produce content that utilizes it. It’s worse than the chicken and the egg because there’s also got to be some business case for it as well. It becomes more complex than a simple chicken and egg things. Aside from the core issue that we’re looking at I think bandwidth is the next interesting thing that we’re looking at. There’s bandwidth and latency. From what we’ve found, as you scale up both in terms of complexity of the game that you’re making such as an RTS, we’re not looking for thousands of units but tens of thousands of units.

The memory you need for that all of a sudden becomes an issue. If you want to look at it, all of a sudden you have 16 cores instead of 8 and trying to use the same memory bus. Again you’ve got a bottle neck problem. One of the interesting things here is we build our own systems and we generally check them pretty well. I’ve got an I7 development box and we had another I7 development box and one of them was running at 50 frames per second was our CPU score. The other was at 74. We were looking at them and knew there shouldn’t be that fundamental difference between the two. That’s absolutely impossible. There’s something clearly wrong here. I ended up running Vtune on the box that was running slower and we notice that the bandwidth on the slower machine was capped at 11 gigabytes a second. It turns out; whoever had built the box had put the two memory dibs in the single channel slots so it wouldn’t register. It registered a single channel to a dual channel memory. Once we fixed that it went right back up to 70 frames per second. We’re seeing cases where increased bandwidth is going to result in increased CPU performance. We’re interested in testing out the newer DDR4 platforms especially with the higher frequency RAM, lower latency.

Ravi: One thing I found interesting that the PCs that are having these problems come up every few years. The same issue we come back to it. Whereas with consoles which have that limited hardware for years and years at a time, they’re finding ways to think outside the box. With Cloudgen on Xbox One developing Crackdown 3 and such. What’s your overall take on the cloud that makes a static console more powerful? Is there something in store like that for Nitrous? Have you ever considered inserting cloud computing with Nitrous?

Dev Team: Like cloud rendering?

"I think the cloud tends to be much more successful when you’re aggregating data and crunching numbers and then spitting those results out to a large number of users. From either a shading stand point there’s a reduced bandwidth cost there and there’s latency tolerance."

Ravi: Yeah.

Dev Team: Maybe. There are things we could do. You could do significant rendering calculations on the host and upload them. The way our engines works there are no latency issues. You might see some occasional rendering every now and again. So we haven’t really invested in it. Other than to know the architecture is compatible. From a business standpoint we’re always skeptical when we see cloud computer. The reason why is when you add up all the overhead in a big machine somewhere else, it’s not that expensive to have a machine locally. It’s never clear when it becomes a benefit.

I think a lot of it tends to wind up, as Dan says, a cost calculation. I think the cloud tends to be much more successful when you’re aggregating data and crunching numbers and then spitting those results out to a large number of users. From either a shading stand point there’s a reduced bandwidth cost there and there’s latency tolerance. If you look at AI generation and running AI in the cloud that becomes a really interesting idea. Because you can aggregate a lot of different users results, put them together and then dynamically form that data back out to other players. If you’re doing procedural generation of various parts of worlds or things, you’re streaming some of the results down, I think there are a lot of ways that that can work. But you definitely have to be careful about it.

Ravi: Coming to Ashes of the Singularity, the first thing I was wondering with regards to the gameplay: when I saw the concept for the gameplay there was tens of thousands of units on screen at the same time; and there were these battles happening simultaneously; what really struck me was that this is very similar to Total Annihilation.

Dev Team: I would say Total Annihilation is a good comparison.

Ravi: Even Planetary Annihilation.

Dev Team: I would say that Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. There’s really like 4 different touchtone groups: there’s Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, and Starcraft. I think all 4 of those games have provided, hopefully, an informed decision. Whenever we’re forced with a decision to make in the game those are the games we go back to the most and take a look at.

Ravi: When you look at the gameplay model itself there’s always that concern Supreme Commander was coming out there’s that concern that, “how are people going to manage when battles happen all at once.” How are you going to cater to the hardcore strategy gamers, but also help newer gamers to get into it as well? How will you manage these concerns?

Dev Team: We use traditional tools: there’s mini maps and there’s an expanded map to help give you an idea of what’s going on. In addition we have something we call the “Empire Tree.” Basically, it’s very similar to what’s in Sins of a Solar Empire. Keeping track of what units and factories are doing. And as much automation as we can get away with.

We’ve got the battle groups. Battle groups can have a hundred guys in it. And you’re managing them with one order. The production queue has been modified.

You can order reinforcements from units. If an army at the front gates needs more guys they can just say, “some factory, please send me these guys as soon as possible.” Things like that help speed up and help manage gameplay. Anywhere that we’ve noticed that it tends to be tedious or extra work to go back and do something we’re trying to remove those bottlenecks where we can.

"I think we’re actually more set up for the next generation, whenever that’s going to be. Not that we know anything of what it’s going to be or anything yet. If you double the cores and increase the GPU Nitrous will scale."

Ravi: With regards to what you’re going to have with Early Access– there’s going to be a skirmish mode, 1v1 multiplayer, and 3 medium sized maps for both single and multiplayer. What are the long term plans for the game in terms of content? What kind of maps, modes are you going to add into it?

Dev Team: Oh my goodness. That’s a huge question. I would say the best thing to do would to follow up with Brad on that and see what he’s got planned. To some extent, to be very frank and honest some of that is going to be based on the user feedback for Early Access. Some of that’s going to be based on feedback when we launch the game. There’s stuff users are really excited about and we’re going to focus on that stuff rather than focus on stuff we think is going to be more interesting. We want to make sure the users are enjoying themselves and having a good time. Some of the things we’re interested in is making sure people can access to as many maps as they can. There’s a couple ways we’re looking at that. We’re also looking at different terrain types. The game modes is also very interesting. I think we’ll likely be — not in Early Access — for release and beyond we’ll be looking at adding different types of game modes, not just traditional skirmish.

Ravi: The final question I have and I’m not sure how you’re going to answer this. There are these rumours going around with Nintendo’s next platform, which is the NX. How are you going to get a PC to run a high end– we need a high end CPU and GPU chip just to run the tech demo. I was wondering your thoughts on that. Given that we’ve already had one current generation of consoles and then we have this platform that’s apparently going to be even more powerful. What are your thoughts on that and how Nitrous Engine will scale as the next wave of consoles approaches?

Dev Team: I don’t know anything about the NX. You probably know more.

Ravi: I probably don’t.

Dev Team: I don’t know what they’re building. I think we’ll run great on it. I think we’re actually more set up for the next generation, whenever that’s going to be. Not that we know anything of what it’s going to be or anything yet. If you double the cores and increase the GPU Nitrous will scale. We’ve done 16 threads. We’ll scale with 16 cores right now. The only reason I’ve tested higher than that is because we don’t have more in the machine than that. We’re well prepared for the next gen tech transition. If someone’s going to ship a console with double the performance of the current consoles, we’d definitely love to play around with it. I think we’d be very successful there.

DirectX 12 is no longer an API that’s seemingly on the horizon – it’s out and about with Windows 10. The question is – how many developers are making games to take advantage of it? It will be a while before every single developer hops on board but GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Oxide Games, creator of the Nitrous Engine and Ashes of the Singularity, one of the few DX12-supported games on the market, about the API’s adoption rates.

We asked Dan Baker, Tim Kipp and Brian Wade of Oxide if their close relationship with Microsoft for DirectX 12 could provide any information on the adoption rates of the API and feedback from devs that have used it so far.

They stated that, “We have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. I actually worked on DirectX years ago, so I know those guys personally. We gave Microsoft out entire Mantle station and said, ‘have at it.’ We worked back and forth with them for a year. They helped us a lot with the initial implication. We’ve learned a lot. The difference between DX12 and the previous API is that the previous API was designed by Microsoft and they threw it over the fence and hoped it worked. This time around we actually had everything working and prototyped before the API was finalized. We’re pretty sure that everything works great. That’s a huge change from the previous ones.”

Right now, the adoption rate for DirectX 12 is fairly positive and there’s a desire to drop DX11 support in order to make full use of its potential.

“Consumer adoption seems pretty positive. DX12 works with a vast majority of GPUs. We’re not at a point yet where we would drop our DX11 support. We wish we could. Wish we could because we can’t completely take advantage of all of DX12 until we kill our DX11 version. We’re pretty happy with the adoption. To some extent whenever you’ve got something new like DirectX 12, you need people to pioneer the way. Once they prove that it works then you start to see a greater adoption. It’s an exponential growth. Somebody’s got to start somewhere. I’m really glad we’ve got such a good working relationship with Microsoft and Nvidia and AMD because trying to pioneer a new engine on top of a brand new graphics API and a brand new OS is definitely challenging for everyone involved.”

What are your thoughts on DirectX 12 and its current state in the industry? Let us know in the comments below. Stay tuned for our full interview with the developers next week.

Stardock have announced that their newest strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity, will be launching on Steam Early Access on October 22, 2015. Ashes of the Singularity looks pretty good as is, so you have reason enough to care for it, but since Stardock were also behind the excellent Sins of a Solar Empire, we have enough grounds to be suitably excited for the game.

Ashes of the Singularity seems to promise somewhat of a revolution for PC strategy games- it is the first native 64-bit 3D RTS, that also uses a new 3D engine (Nitrous) that fully leverages modern multi-core PCs. The game is also the first game to support Microsoft’s new DirectX 12 API. Besides being the first 64-bit RTS and being the first to use DirectX 12, Ashes of the Singularity also includes the first asynchronous multi-core real-time AI.

“Previously, RTS games had to choose between great visuals or lots of units, due to being limited to 32-bit and DirectX 9 based engines,” said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. “It’s one of the reasons that RTS games have kind of hit a wall these past few years. The RTS could be pretty or be epic, but not both. Thanks to the Nitrous engine, we can support tens of thousands of units acting independently as part of a worldwide battle with a distinct visual style.

Set in the distant future, the player starts on a contested planet with a single headquarters. In the vein of the Age of Empires games, or Stardock’s own Sins of a Solar Empire, the player must gather resources, build factories, research new technologies, manage a global economy, manufacture massive armies of machine-based constructs, and conquer enemies in combat.

“We are very excited to go into early access,” said Wardell. “Given how ambitious this game is, we’re going to need all the help we can get from our player base to reach our goal of making this the most epic, large-scale real time strategy game ever.”

“While we expect the game to have a strong multiplayer community, we are adamant that the single player game have intelligent and challenging computer opponents to play against,” said Wardell. “We have team games with friends versus the AI, free for all, and every other combination in place already to help begin testing this part of the game early. This isn’t one of those games where the AI is an afterthought.”

So, yeah. It looks pretty damn awesome, and is totally something you should look into, if you have a machine that can handle it.

GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Wardell about Ashes of the Singularity along with various other topics like DirectX 12, how well the RTS benefits from the API and whether it scales across numerous systems.

"The big thing here is that Nitrous has what you call an Asynchronous Scheduler. In a normal engine, like pretty much every engine that's been released, commands that are going to be sent to your graphics card are serialized."

Kurtis Simpson: At GDC, you guys announced Ashes of the Singularity, which plans to redefine what people think about large strategy games. Can you please share more details about it? 

Brad Wardell: The idea behind Ashes of the Singularity is to do a real time strategy game that takes place across the world. So if you think of every RTS you’ve played in the past you’re fighting individual and maybe hundreds of units in the world or even on a single map. What we want to do with Ashes of the Singularity is to have a RTS in which players clearly see that this is a world war, with thousands and thousands of units that are fighting it out on screen.

I realise that some people will worry about controlling all those units and the way we approach that is through this Meta unit concept, which is where individual units can be controlled, if you want to, but it gets a little unmanageable at a certain point. The interface makes it really trivial to combine these units together where they work as an army. Now the player is acting as General commanding armies to go do their thing while the units are taking care of all the grunt work.

Kurtis Simpson: The demo at GDC was extremely impressive with over 5500 units with each of them having their own light source. What can you say about the kind of changes you did in the Nitrous Engine to support this level of rendering? 

Brad Wardell: The big thing here is that Nitrous has what you call an Asynchronous Scheduler. In a normal engine, like pretty much every engine that’s been released, commands that are going to be sent to your graphics card are serialized. You send them to the scheduler, it serializes them up, and they go one at a time. What we’ve managed to do with Nitrous is that it’s done in parallel. So it’s Asynchronous, every single core on your CPU can talk to your graphics card at the same time.

If we were running on a single-core machine we wouldn’t be any better, the performance of Ashes…We couldn’t do it. It would be the same as any of the RTS’ that have came out in the past but now a days since we’ require at least a four-core CPU, which most people have. Unless you’re running a laptop some people only have two but pretty much most people have four or more, you get literally four times improvement in performance.

Kurtis Simpson: Is this due to the benefits of DX12?

Brad Wardell: DX12, Mantle and Vulkan make it really practical, so even under DirectX11 we’re doing a lot of crazy stuff with all the cores but the problem with DirectX 11 is that even with our scheduler, DirectX11 still serializes up a lot of our commands so we lose a lot of benefits. Not all of it but you know, a substantial amount, so we have to turn down a lot of our cool effects. But we’re still able to do thousands of units on-screen at once, we just can’t show them at quite the same glory. On DirectX 12 though they get out of our way entirely and we can have complete control of the GPU.

Kurtis Simpson: I see. DirectX12, it looks to bring some really important and really cool things to the table.

Brad Wardell: It’s too bad that Microsoft and others have kind of spent their goodwill with past DirectX releases and now that Microsoft’s releasing something genuinely revolutionary people are like “Ye, ye, we’ve heard this before”. And one of the reasons why I’ve been so vocal about it is this…DirectX 12 really is different than anything we’ve ever seen before.

Kurtis Simpson: Talking more about the game itself the demo was being shown on the game’s smallest map. Does this mean the larger areas of the game will have even more units on the screens? 

Brad Wardell: The map we had running at the show had 7700 hundred units. When you get to bigger maps you’re talking 15-20,000 units potentially. The larger maps are designed primarily for people who are playing it with a group of friends. If they’re playing multiplayer that could take place over days or weeks.

Kurtis Simpson: That’s really impressive. From your own testing what’s the maximum number of units you’ve been able to push on-screen at once?

Brad Wardell: Oh well, a lot. I actually don’t know, we haven’t really played with it. We’ve only got to the point where the art assets are at a level where they would be comparable to something you would have on screen. Even like six weeks ago, the unit’s art wasn’t sophisticated enough, it was meaningless. Their art was so primitive whereas only in the last few weeks we’ve got to the point where it’s started to get pretty sophisticated, but we’ve easily got it to over 20,000 units without a hiccup. So you’re talking a couple orders of magnitude higher than any other RTS. These are actual individual units with their own guns, their own minds, and their own everything!

Though I should clarify one thing because I’ve read what people are talking about what  games they like, games like Total War and Supreme Commander which are outstanding games. But what they’re doing is that their actual numbers of units are far less and they are using instancing which are that they’re really just the same units being mirrored on the screen. Whereas In Ashes of Singularity, these are actual individual units with their own guns, their own minds, and their own everything! It’s not that it’s better or worse, it’s just that it’s different because the hardware capabilities are so much more now.

"One of things are the light sources, we have real light! You know your typical PC game or even a console game might have four or eight light sources. On DirectX11 we'll have four, maybe eight real light sources. But on DirectX 12 we can have thousands of light sources."

Kurtis Simpson: Speaking on hardware, the game clearly scales well across modern CPUs and hardware. But how well does it fair on CPUs from say three to four years ago?

Brad Wardell: Ironically at the Microsoft booth at the show [GDC], it was running on the worst DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 performance you could get, because they’re running on the fastest CPU they could get. And DirectX 12 actually shows up better on a slower machine that has lots of cores, so if you are running on a Intel Core-i5 with say four cores, it would destroy a DirectX 11 machine running on the highest-end hardware you can get.

Kurtis Simpson: So the performance of the same hardware is doubling if not tripling you would say?

Brad Wardell: Every core makes a huge difference. I think most people realise this but it hasn’t really been simplified in such a way that’s put in black and white so to speak. It’s that your video cards for years have been monsters, I think most people realise that for a while the video cards have been quite a bit more powerful than the CPUs themselves. That’s why you get this high end card and it sounds like a there’s a jet engine in your machine.

Kurtis Simpson: So it’s all down to the scaling.

Brad Wardell: Exactly. If I have one core that does let’s say a speed of one, I am still better off with four cores at the speed of four.

Kurtis Simpson: Is Ashes of the Singularity CPU-intensive in anyway, in terms of how well the Nitrous Engine renders the game? Or is it more GPU-bound?

Brad Wardell: Yes, we’ll max out all your cores if we can. We try to do as much as we can regardless if you are running a slow CPU or a fast CPU we try to maximise every core.

Kurtis Simpson: Ashes of the Singularity is going to run on DX12 although not exclusively. What kind of benefits will the DX12 version have over DX11 version more specifically? 

Brad Wardell: One of things are the light sources, we have real light! You know your typical PC game or even a console game might have four or eight light sources. On DirectX11 we’ll have four, maybe eight real light sources. But on DirectX 12 we can have thousands of light sources. And that has a very subtle impact on how real the game looks, and I don’t mean real as in real life but you know, even if you watch a CGI movie like Toy Story they don’t look like videogames right. You look at, what’s a recent Pixar movie? You look at it and you know it’s not real because it’s their style but it definitely doesn’t look like a videogame.

Then you look at a video game and you go “There’s something video-gamey about it” and what it is that it’s mostly about how they’re rendered on the screen, about how they’re lit so to speak. How motion and depth-of-field are handled, and what games do although this gets too technical but everything on games these days is done through deferred rendering. Whereas in movies they’re done using what’s called object-space rendering, which is what we’re doing. So on DirectX11 we have to disable some of those effects like some of the true depth-of-field, some of the temporal anti-aliasing, and some of the things that make the world feel a little more…again not realistic as if you think you’re looking out of a window but more tangible.

Kurtis Simpson: More natural-looking would you say?

Brad Wardell: Yeah, I don’t know the right word to describe it,  like if you’re watching an animated movie you know, it looks more real even though it’s clearly not.

Kurtis Simpson: Exaggerated-realism.

Brad Wardell: Yes, there’s something more tangible when I’m watching a movie like say even Big Hero 6.

Kurtis Simpson: Perfect example. Ashes of the Singularity, are there any plans to do an open Beta for the game? Furthermore do you have a release window? 

Brad Wardell: Yes we’re planning to start going into early-access in the summer, probably somewhere mid-July. One of the things we’ve learned from Off World Trading Company which has got really good responses, is that we’re way better off having these Betas come out when they’re really more mature, but still give them plenty of time for user feedback. You know we don’t want people to get into this and then the game doesn’t even play. We want them to sit down and fully be able to play the game and be able to fully give us feedback on what they don’t like about the game, what they do like about the game, and things they would like to see change and that kind of thing.

"You know when those 5K monitors come out this year and a lot of people aren't even thinking about this yet but here's an easy sell-point right, you're not going to be running high-end games on DirectX11 on 4K or 5K monitors, you just can't do it."

Kurtis Simpson: With DX12 you’ve spoken on the potential of achieving movie-like quality in videogames. How fast do you think DX12 will become the norm when it launches later this year?

Brad Wardell: I think there will be a lot of pressure to get by consumers to get on it because you saw the demo of Ashes, and that’s a Pre-Alpha. Our art team did not want it shown yet because they didn’t think it was pretty enough, and even then it was something people haven’t seen before. So if you can imagine what it’s going to look like when it’s done or when the first games come out using really huge budgets with DirectX12. It’s just such a night and day difference.

Kurtis Simpson: I mean you say the art team wasn’t happy about what was being shown, but was has been shown is really impressive. So when the game comes out and DirectX12 really takes off, when things with the game are finalised it’s going to blow things out off the water.

Brad Wardell: Half of the ships were not textured, there were no trees or any other interesting things on the map and you know the lighting wasn’t in and the shadows. No one had seen a 4K game with thousands of units on-screen at once, DirectX11 couldn’t even attempt that.

Here you would have people walk in and although we were running on Mantle the same applies to DirectX12, there it is, a 4K game. No one had seen a 4K game with thousands of units on-screen at once, DirectX11 couldn’t, DirectX11 couldn’t even attempt that you couldn’t do it.

You know when those 5K monitors come out this year and a lot of people aren’t even thinking about this yet but here’s an easy sell-point right, you’re not going to be running high-end games on DirectX11 on 4K or 5K monitors, you just can’t do it.

Kurtis Simpson: As of right now it would seem like brute-force with graphic cards, I mean that seems to be the only plausible way right now with 4K.

Brad Wardell: Well I mean it is brute-force but you can’t even feed the graphics cards with DirectX11 or 9 fast enough. I could take a ten year old game or a five year old game even and run them at 4K, but if you want to do a modern production game with that sophistication running at 4K, you can’t do that running on DirectX11. There just isn’t the bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU because you’re just having one core talk to the graphics card.

Kurtis Simpson: DirectX11 is like a bottleneck that’s overstayed its welcome.

Brad Wardell: Yes and Microsoft’s pushing hard, Windows 10 is free to everyone who has Windows 7 and based on the Steam hardware survey most of the people have video cards that will upgrade to DirectX12. So it’s not like people have to, I mean the operating system’s free so it’s not like people have to buy new hardware. There’s already going to be a market, it’s not going to be like when Microsoft foolishly made DirectX10 Windows Vista only and then you had to get a new video card and then. They’ve learned their lesson.

Kurtis Simpson: That’s how it would seem. Staying on the topic of DirectX12 according to the majority of our previous interviews with other developers regarding the Xbox One, it seems like it already has a low-level API that’s similar to DX12. Do you think that DirectX12 will improve the Xbox One’s hardware that much given that it’s static, unlike the PC? 

Brad Wardell: It won’t have the same impact. There are a couple of things that are important in DirectX1 2 for Xbox One developers though. First of all Xbox performance is completely the result of the eSRAM feature and there isn’t a true or false thing with regards to one using eSRAM. You could use it well or you could use it poorly or somewhere in-between, and their API which is the current DirectX11 extension for the Xbox is really crappy for dealing with the eSRAM. That has resulted in what’s called Resolution Gate. 

I’ve never heard Microsoft just come out and, I mean they should just really come out and explain to people why they’re having problems getting games to run at 1080p. But maybe they don’t think their users will understand, basically it has to do with developers aren’t making effective use of the eSRAM API. So in DirectX12 they actually threw it away, they threw away the crappy one in DirectX11 and they’re replacing it with a new one. So that’s pretty huge.

They also released a new tool, it’s this optimization tool that will actually algorithmically try to come up with an optimization for the developer. So instead of the developer trying to hand set-up what uses eSRAM, they have their own app to try and do as much of it for them as they can. Third, DirectX11 still serializes stuff from the developer to the GPU. It is low-level but the fact is as low-level as it, it’s still serializing a lot of GPU calls. So it won’t be anywhere near…you won’t get the benefit on Xbox One that you’re getting on the PC.

It’s  completely different but you are going to get a substantial benefit. The part I think that users will care about is that it should address the resolution stuff for most people. That’s what I think is the most glaring thing that people are upset about. But it won’t do anything magically. The developers still have to use it, it’s not like your old games will magically be faster.

"Now maybe in Unity or Unreal, one of the other guys will write their engines in such a way so that they make the most use of it, but that's going to take time. Whereas if they use something like Vulkan, it's not as low-level as their API, but Vulkan has the advantage that it's really easy to write for it."

Kurtis Simpson: So a lot of it is all on the developers and how they use it.

Brad Wardell:  I mean that’s the thing I like about being able to make a prediction, is that something that’s on a visual medium like this is that we’ll be able to revisit this discussion a year from now and it will be pretty obvious. You’ll see the games that run on DirectX 12 and you’ll be able to compare them with games that run on DirectX11 on the Xbox One and you’ll be like ‘Oh, yeah there’s quite a difference’.

Kurtis Simpson: With games such as Ryse: Son of Rome which looked pretty impressive when the Xbox One first launched over a year ago, it’s pretty difficult to imagine how much more the games will improve, given it looks that good already.

Brad Wardell: With the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One they’re not even remotely scratching the surface for what people can do and there’s still…I mean on the PlayStation 4 and their low-level API, they’re all still very…they’re like written for last-gen but updated for this gen. I wouldn’t say they’re completely native yet, I mean they are native but you know these words all get misused, but this gen’s graphics are still very far behind where they’re going to be. 

Kurtis Simpson: That’s something for people to look forward too then.

Brad Wardell: Yeah they’re not even scratching the surface.

Kurtis Simpson: With the public perception of Xbox One and since the announcement of DirectX12 and its impact on the Xbox One, Microsoft has seemed pretty silent. They appear to have taken a silent approach as to how DirectX12 will affect the Xbox One. What are your thoughts on this as to why they’re so silent? Whereas other people and developers such as you have been quite outspoken about its benefits and what kind of impact it’s going to have.

Brad Wardell: With the Xbox One we’re being pretty speculative right because there isn’t a game that’s using DirectX 12 on the console at this point in time, so I can’t even do a side by side comparison. Whereas on the PC we have Ashes of the Singularity. It is a game that’s been optimized for DirectX 11 and updated for DirectX 12, and you can run them side by side on the same hardware and get a 70% boost on DirectX 12 over DirectX 11.

So it’s pretty easy for me to say yes you’ll get a huge impact on PC, but on the console it’s all a theory. They have nothing, they don’t even know. I mean I’ve talked to the development team there on this subject for a while and it basically boils down to, we don’t know how much of an effect it will have because so much of it is in the hands of the developer.

Kurtis Simpson: Right I see. One of the interesting features of DX12 which was showcased at GDC was ExecuteIndirect which allows multiple draw calls with a single API call. Do you see the developers using this functionality to improve performance on the Xbox One? 

Brad Wardell: That I couldn’t say. I mean you could argue that comes in to the bundles feature. My guys at Oxide they’re not too keen on bundles themselves. So I don’t know, I don’t feel comfortable to say yes or no on that. I’m not familiar with that enough to speak on it.

Kurtis Simpson: Okay that’s perfectly fine. Not too long ago you tweeted that PS4 owners will have something to look forward as well. As far as a lot of people know, Sony is pretty secretive regarding their API technology. What kind of information could you share regarding the PS4’s API and how rapidly it will progress in the upcoming months? 

Brad Wardell: What I was referencing at the time was Vulkan. We’re part of the Khronos Group and now it depends who you talk to at Sony and this gets in to a debate. Sony has a very low-level API already for the PlayStation 4. The problem I have with it is that if you want to make use for it you’re writing some very specific code just for the PlayStation 4. And in the real world people don’t do that right. I write code generally to be as cross-platform as I can.

Now maybe in Unity or Unreal, one of the other guys will write their engines in such a way so that they make the most use of it, but that’s going to take time. Whereas if they use something like Vulkan, it’s not as low-level as their API, but Vulkan has the advantage that it’s really easy to write for it. So you’re more likely to get developers to code to that and get more games on to Sony then you would otherwise.

"Yes, because DirectX12 is such a game changer for everyone. So first of all everyone's going to use that for Xbox One. What will be interesting to see with Vulkan is that every hardware vendor is going to support DirectX12. Now the question will be how quickly Nvidia and Intel will support Vulkan and at what level."

Kurtis Simpson: Right. So as everyone more or less knows the PS4 has better hardware than the Xbox One due to its GDDR5 Ram architecture. Having said that do you think the DDR3 in the Xbox One is somewhat compensated enough by its fast eSRAM? 

Brad Wardell: That depends on who you talk to. In my personal opinion the eSRAM does not quite make up for it but it makes it really close. The real problem is that the Xbox One only has 12 what you would call cores on their GPU and I think the PlayStation 4 has around 18. The hardware on the PlayStation 4 in my opinion is better than the hardware on the Xbox One.

So you end up in an impractical manner with games that are going to be of a similar capability. I’d rather write for Windows, as an example I’d rather write for Windows than Micro Controller (laughs) or something where I have to know things that are a little less standard or a little more arcane. Of course what’s arcane is always a matter of where you’re sitting though. As a Windows developer I find the Xbox One more familiar to me, whereas if you’re a Linux developer you might find the PlayStation 4 a little more familiar. That’s just an example.

Kurtis Simpson: Speaking more on the eSRAM itself, it’s considered to be the major cause behind the resolution gate on the Xbox One. Do you think DX12 can help remedy the resolution issue for the Xbox One? 

Brad Wardell: Yeah, it should do, because in DirectX11 it’s really a pain to make good use of the eSRAM. Whereas supposedly in DirectX12 and this is all theory, I haven’t used it myself but the new API is supposed to make it a lot easier to optimize your use of the eSRAM memory.

Kurtis Simpson: Okay because it sounds like, when you think about it now it sounds like it was built specifically DX12 and not DX11.

Brad Wardell: The API is there for me to use as a tool for the piece of hardware. And the one that was in DirectX11 was not easy, it was a very trial and error process to make use of the eSRAM. In DirectX12 they’ve tried to make it easier to make use with and the easier it is to use, the more likely you’re going to get developers who optimize for it correctly.

Kurtis Simpson: Right, well switching topics just briefly over to Mantle and Vulkan. Many people are claiming that Mantle is dead in the water now due to Vulkan. What are your thoughts to this? Do you think Mantle’s dead and that Vulkan and DX12 are the next big thing? Or is there more to Mantle still being adopted? 

Brad Wardell: Vulkan, literally is a derivative of Mantle. So in terms of whether AMD will long-term continue a separately commanded Mantle API is something that remains to be seen. I think they’re certainly going to continue for the near-term, we’re going to continue to support it. The thing is if I’m writing for Vulkan, I’m also writing for Mantle effectively. I think there’s a lot of confusion on that, I don’t think people realise where Vulkan came from. I think they imagine “Oh! It’s OpenGL”  but has a different architecture.

Kurtis Simpson: Do you think Sony may drop its own custom API and switch completely to Mantle for the PS4 in response to DirectX 12 on Xbox One? 

Brad Wardell: No, because their low-level API is still lower level than Mantle and Vulkan. So what I’m hoping is that they will support Vulkan.

Kurtis Simpson: So there’s no real benefits would you say? And that’s its best they stick with their own custom API?

Brad Wardell: Let’s say I write a game for the Steam Box and the PlayStation 4 supports Vulkan, the Steam Box supports Vulkan. It wouldn’t be that much more work for me to have my game work on the PlayStation 4. Whereas right now if I want to develop the game for the PlayStation 4, I have to learn their special custom API, that has shader languages that are different than what I’m used to, and I’m pretty sure that I have to send stuff in text instead of binary form.

I hate OpenGL (laughs). They’re old, their current one is just archaic. I don’t want to have to learn that, my brain is already full of OS2 and Linux crap, I don’t want to learn yet another short-term API. If I can just learn Vulkan then I can get to a lot of platforms, I don’t want to have to learn Sony’s special API, even if I would gain a few frames-per-second in doing so.

Kurtis Simpson: One of the reasons why DirectX has been able to stay relevant all these years is that Microsoft has invested in the API’s research and development. Having said that, with Vulkan do you think they’ll still be able to sustain that level with DX12? 

Brad Wardell: Yes, because DirectX12 is such a game changer for everyone. So first of all everyone’s going to use that for Xbox One. What will be interesting to see with Vulkan is that every hardware vendor is going to support DirectX12. Now the question will be how quickly Nvidia and Intel will support Vulkan and at what level. What we’re going to see is that in the next few years we’re going to see a lot of benchmarking wars.

Because you’re going to see a lot of games coming out with both Vulkan and DirectX12 support, it’s going to be a lot like the old days. You load up Quake and you can play in OpenGL (laugh) and DirectX, and then there will be demos and benchmarks you can look up to.

"Every time I see screenshots of Ashes, I wince. Because it's harder to take a screenshot of something in movement like that because everything's a little blurred. We are going to have to come up with a screenshot-mode. It’s easy with a normal game because every frame is a discreet frame."

Kurtis Simpson: Most definitely. Moving back to the Xbox One, Microsoft have made bold claims about using the Cloud with the Xbox One. Do you think it’s a possibility that the console’s processing power can be increased especially with DX12?

Brad Wardell: That is a…yes and a no. I don’t want to weasel out on that because there are specific cases where yes you can. Microsoft just needs to make a case. I don’t want it to be my job to make the case, but let me give you a few examples of where it would come in to play, since to my knowledge Microsoft has not actually put out any examples.

Procedurally Generated Terrain is one of the most expensive things that you could do. You do not need to do it in real-time but it takes a heck of a lot of CPU power. Let’s give you an example, let’s say I’m playing a role playing game and I want a really sophisticated, we’re talking next Elder Scrolls game. This is obviously not, I have no idea what they’re doing but it’s just an example of a game that might use something like this. And I want to have incredibly sophisticated terrain that is going to support rivers and streams, forests and mountains, and I want it to be very detailed.

Now I don’t need to procedurally generate all that stuff on the fly, and you’re going to need to have to procedurally generate it. With that amount of detail you can’t have some map editor guy with some art tools, making stuff like you used to. You’re going to procedurally generate it to give it that level of detail. Your machine is not going to be powerful enough, certainly not the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4 or even most PCs.

They’re not powerful enough to generate that sort of thing easily to that detail. You could put that in the Cloud, and the results of that procedural generation will be sent back over to your Xbox One, so you could get these amazing scenes without any loading screens. Remember the old days we used to have “Loading next area of the game”? This sort of thing could prevent that kind of stuff.

Kurtis Simpson: I’m rather sceptical of the Cloud myself. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have shown much since the Xbox One’s launch.

Brad Wardell: Microsoft needs to make the case for it, I mean that’s the thing they blew with the Kinect. I could tell you how it could be used, how I would use it if I were Microsoft and I had the money. But I’m not Microsoft and I don’t have the money to do something that sophisticated.

But I can tell you like in Ashes of the Singularity, our terrain in that game is procedurally generated. We we’re able to do that by having the GPU procedurally generate the terrain, otherwise it would take hours (laughs). But it sure would be handy if I had Microsoft’s resources to toss all that procedural generation in to the cloud.

Kurtis Simpson: Most definitely. With Ashes of the singularity only being announced for the PC will it be coming to the consoles?

Brad Wardell: We don’t know, I don’t want to do any sacrifices on the game itself to support other platforms. We’ve seen strategy games try to do that in the past and they end up kind of gimped. We are looking at porting Nitrous Engine to the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One in the future.

Kurtis Simpson: Just to wrap things up on DirectX12. Do you think the graphics difference between the PS4 and Xbox One will become trivial, as DX12 is adopted by more developers as time goes on?

Brad Wardell: Yeah. I mean to the people who are really hardcore they’re always going to find a difference in it, to the average person they’re not going to notice a difference. That’s why when I see these people battling on Twitter about, even as is, I understand the differences but I can’t really tell much difference between the two.

Kurtis Simpson: Earlier on we were talking about the movie-like qualities, the differences between games and movies and such. I recall you in an interview with TIC podcast (The Inner Circle), and you were speaking on rendering a scene from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.

Brad Wardell: Right and we’re doing that right now. Ashes of the Singularity as is, in its Alpha, is running more sophisticated scenes that would you’ve seen in The Phantom Menace. I mean let me give you an example, did you watch that final battle of the Gungans versus the Battle Droid? Those explosions don’t even cast light. I mean their explosions are basically glorified cartoons.

Because you knew even at the time it was CGI you just couldn’t explain why and because it didn’t have real light sources, and we’re able to do that right now on today’s hardware, you know on a much smaller budget and on a Pre-Alpha. What will have to happen is that you’re going to have stop these 3D-engines doing this deferred-rendering stuff and move to an object-space model, setup. Basically the way CGI does stuff.

Kurtis Simpson: Yeah, watching that scene now and thinking on the topics you’ve just mentioned, all that stuff becomes a lot clearer and stands out as such. But back then when you first see it, it really is impressive and you say you’re able to do something that’s more sophisticated in Ashes of the Singularity. It’s massive step-up even though it was all those years back.

Brad Wardell: And you know what’s ironic? Every time I see screenshots of Ashes, I wince. Because it’s harder to take a screenshot of something in movement like that because everything’s a little blurred. We are going to have to come up with a screenshot-mode. It’s easy with a normal game because every frame is a discreet frame. Where as in Ashes because things move with temporal anti-aliasing it’s always a little blurred as it’s actually moving. You know it’s like taking a snap-shot off a movie.

"I don't know my skeptical side says it's a fad but we have an Oculus Rift, we've played around with it and if they can just nail down some of the visual experience issues, we should be able to be done in time. I think there's going to be types of games for it, I don't want to play a current style game with it."

Kurtis Simpson: Yeah it would appear that it’s best seen in motion. Just to end this on an off-topic question, what are your thoughts on Virtual Reality and Valve’s VR headset? Do you think it’s going to be widely adopted?

Brad Wardell: I’m pretty excited about it! It doesn’t really apply to our type of game so I don’t know as a developer, I’m not sure on how I would use it yet, but as a player I’m very excited for it. I’m hoping…I would love to see them do Half-Life 3 for it, that’ll get me to buy it.

Kurtis Simpson: Is it confirmed? Is that Half-Life3 confirmed? 

Brad Wardell: Oh no (laughs) I would have no idea. I mean that’s the dream right?  If we could make it true by just by saying that then I would absolutely say, yes.

Kurtis Simpson: Well I’m taking that as a confirmation and it’s going on Twitter very soon. So VR,  it’s not going to be fad would you say? It’s not going to be 3D. Do you think it could replace people’s TV screens?

Brad Wardell:  I don’t know my skeptical side says it’s a fad but we have an Oculus Rift, we’ve played around with it and if they can just nail down some of the visual experience issues, we should be able to be done in time. I think there’s going to be types of games for it, I don’t want to play a current style game with it. I can see someone making a new type of game that we can’t currently think of, but someone will make it. It just needs a Killer-App, the question is whether someone will make a Killer-App.

Kurtis Simpson: That’s what it seems to boil down as people have been looking at primarily for first-person-horrors and first-person-shooter. But first-person-shooters specifically don’t seem to be an ideal match due to the control scheme and the headset. You’re not actually moving anywhere so it seems to contradict it.

Brad Wardell: I’m not sure. I’m not creative enough to think on how they’ll do that. The thing that makes Valve’s VR very interesting to me is the fact that it does recognize, it does track real-world space. So you could be walking around and if you do come up to a real-world object it will kind of show up in your virtual world.

Which is potentially interacting with your real world and interacting with the actual game itself. I can’t think of examples yet. It’s kind of like Kinect, the question is whether VR will end up like it. Not so much like 3D but as much as Kinect, where you go “Oh! It just needs a Killer-App but what is it I don’t know!”

Kurtis Simpson: Hopefully not. Kinect seemed like one big lie; although it had potential it died.

Brad Wardell: Yea,  they sacrificed a lot for the Kinect. You’d think they’ll have Killer-App that shipped with the Xbox One.

Kurtis Simpson: Thanks so much Brad it’s been great talking to you on DirectX12 and Ashes of the Singularity. I’m really looking forward to it.

Brad Wardell: It’s great talking to you also and thank you.