Shinra's Vision for Gaming / Presented at GigHacks 2015

Shinra TechnologiesGighacks 2015COLIN WILLIAMSON

DIRECTOR OF

PARTNERSHIPS

© 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.


Who is this guy?Name: Colin Williamson

Blood Type: AB

Likes: Cats

Dislikes: Octopus

Favorite Game:Daytona USA

Fighting Style:Sneaky


Who are these guys? A new cloud gaming platform…and not a publisher

Subsidiary of Square Enix in Tokyo

Headquarters in New York City

Technology team in Montreal

Shinra Offices (Circa 20XX)

Shinra Offices (Circa 2015)


High-workload cloud

Streaming Video

Controller Input

Cloud

Internet

TOMB RAIDER ©2013 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd.CRYSTAL DYNAMICS, the CRYSTAL DYNAMICS logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, LARA CROFT and TOMB RAIDER are registered trademarks or

trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks ofSquare Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. Data Center image from https://www.cwcs.co.uk/


…

…AND NOT A SERVICE WHERE THE DEVELOPER PAYS FOR STREAMING


Why Streaming is Super Great Thin client, deployable to any streaming device

Hey – we don’t have to sell hardware!

We’ll put it on any box with a controller No mobile – for now; mapping 15 buttons to a touchscreen is no fun

No major technical dependencies on client CPU/GPU/OS

No load times if set up correctly

No downloading & patching

No client-side cheating / hacking (hi, eSports!)

Piracy is very, very hard


The Streaming Ecosystem Value has shifted from client to cloud for music, books, movies, TV

But games? We need to push harder The cloud = Big ol’ storage locker

Server-side offload is on the rise

Remote rendering is inevitable

The good news: The infrastructure has caught up


…Now, About the Latency Thing…


The Quality Bar No substandard experiences!

Platform will initially be available on fiber services

We are partnering with fiber infrastructure providers

Service first available in Japan, then expansion to USA and Europe Technical Beta in Japan with NTT East (from Feb. 2015)

Technical Beta in Kansas City for Google Fiber subscribers this summer!

Initial US service in high-spend metropolitan areas, then moving inward (Tesla strategy)


What We Gotta Do

Define what shared compute can do for games

Provide the toolkits to make never-before-seen experiences

Become the de facto platform for cloud-exclusive content

Make smart use of expensive server hardware

Reduce inefficiencies of traditional client-based model

Ensure that the system is scalable

Make Amazing Stuff AND make it Economical


The man in charge Tetsuji Iwasaki System architect

25-year industry veteran

Hobby: Beer

Claims to fame: Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy XI

Crysis


What is a supercomputer, anyway?

Reprinted from http://jp.fujitsu.com/about/tech/k/ スーパーコンピュータ「京」as of 2014/9/17


Top 10 Supercomputers (top500.org)1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)

TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P

NUDT China

2 TitanCray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x

Cray Inc. United States

3 Sequoia BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom IBM United States

4 K-Computer SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect Fujitsu Japan

5 Mira BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom IBM United States

6 Piz Daint Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x Cray Inc. Switzerland

7 StampedePowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi SE10P

Dell United States

8 JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM Germany

9 Vulcan BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM United States

10 Cray Cray XC30, Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz, Aries interconnect Cray Inc. United States

Reprinted from http://www.top500.org


Supercomputers powered by Intel Xeon1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)


NUDT China








Dell United States






Supercomputers powered by Xeon Phi / nVidia Tesla1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)


NUDT China








Dell United States






The Trend General-purpose processors 85.4% of the top500 list is on Intel x86

No exact numbers, but most are likely Xeon

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is ranked as 76th

Amazon EC2 C3 Instance cluster: Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C 2.800GHz, 10G Ethernet


DEGIMA: Supercomputing on a Budget

＊Tsuyoshi Hamada, Tetsu Narumi, Rio Yokota, Kenji Yasuoka and Keigo Nitadori. 42 TFlops Hierarchical N-body Simulations on GPUs with Applications in both Astrophysics and Turbulence. SC '09 Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis Article No. 62

Built by Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center

Hardware specs: Started with 32 GPUs, but then… 256x 8880GTS

256x 9800GTX

288x GTX295

+768 GPUS, sustained performance: 158 Tflops! $7.20 / Gflops 2009 Gordon Bell prize for price/performance!


DEGIMA: Low-cost and Green Cost: $400,000

Was the greenest accelerator-based supercomputer in the world

Upgraded later to Infinibandfor 158 190 TFlops!

At such a low cost, why not use it for games?

Reprinted from http://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~yoshiki/HEART/HEART2012/keynote.html

Professor Tsuyoshi Hamada


…What next? So we’ve put general-purpose CPUs and GPUs in the cloud for compute and render farms

…But how do we put them to smart and economical use?


No empty glasses!5x 80% glasses One 0% glass


Traditional Streaming ArchitectureCPU GPU

Logical unit of game system

Physical unit

• Efficient use of virtual machines

• 1 user = 1 logical unit• Inefficient use of CPU/GPU• High cost per user

CPUGPU

GPU

CPUGPU

CPU

User

User

User


CPU & GPU Performance MatchingCPU

GPU

CPU

GPU


Our solution:Separate CPU from rendering


Remote Rendering Architecture

Logical unit of game system

Physical unit

• Physically separate CPU & GPU Servers

• Many users per logical unit• Flexible architecture allows

efficient CPU/GPU usage

User User User User User User User User




User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User





User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

User User User User

CPU

CPU

CPU GPU

CPU

CPU CPU

CPU CPU

CPU CPU

CPU CPU

GPU

GPU

GPU

GPU

GPU

GPU

GPU


Our Starting Goal

Run any Windows-based DX11 / DX9 game

remotely…

Without having to rebuild the game!


Game.exe Game.exe Renderer.exeGame.exe

inp

ut vide

o

strea

m

renderingcommands

Remote Rendering 101

TOMB RAIDER ©2013 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd.CRYSTAL DYNAMICS, the CRYSTAL DYNAMICS logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, LARA CROFT and TOMB RAIDER are registered trademarks or

trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks ofSquare Enix Holdings Co, Ltd.


System Overview


Fake DLLS = Performance boost

nvwgf2umx.dlld3d11.dll + ≈ 9ms/frame

Faked3d11.dll

ws2_32.dll+ ≈ 4.4ms/frame

• Remote rendering with resource sharing saves 4.6ms per frame in Deus Ex: Human Revolution• We cache the results of operations already performed in other instances

• Saved time = More instances of the game on the server

DEUS EX ©2011 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarksor trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. DEUS EX, the DEUS EX logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, EIDOS MONTREAL and the EIDOS

MONTREAL logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Ltd.

Shared!

Standalone

Deus Ex: HR


Sharing Texture Cache• Problem: GPU memory is limited (and expensive)

We need more memory than normal games for:

• Encoding buffers

• Server window

• Statistics

• Once we run out, the GPU starts swapping!

• We want to run many instances of a game on the same server.

• Solution: Find what can be shared across the multiple instancesof a running game and reuse.


Resource Sharing

DEUS EX ©2011 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarksor trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. DEUS EX, the DEUS EX logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, EIDOS MONTREAL and the EIDOS

MONTREAL logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Ltd.


Density demo4x Quadro K5000

1 screen = 1 GPU

57 game instances on one server PC!

Youtube link here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUSnawf6c8U


Back Catalog Porting We are launching with back catalog content

Porting can take several days (with engines we’ve worked before) or 1-2 weeks (new engines)

Porting takes place on our side Be ready; we may have to ask some code-related questions

Source access makes it much easier for all involved


The result is: Current Windows games run just fine on Shinra Technology…

… Or we can make things much more interesting


The Break in Design


Break in Design

GTA5 Multi WoW EVE


The Game-Changer: 1:N Architecture

Game

Viewer

Viewer

Viewer

Viewer

Viewer

Viewer

Internet

Data Center


Simply stated…

Each player is a viewport to a giant, high-fidelity game world instance that’s

running on a supercomputer


How it works: Uses a single instance of game engine

All players interact within the same world

Physics & AI shared across all users

Think local split-screen game...on a much larger scale

Calculations are done ONCE.

The requirement to write intensive synchronized network code no longer exists

Tokyo Trainwreck assets ©2015 C. Williamson/S. Kojima/R. Gray


So that means… There’s no need to synchronize game & world state across clients!

Cloud-based simulation doesn’t have to be window dressing...

It can directly affect gameplay!


Standard Development: One Pie


Shinra Development: More Pie


Distributed Game Architecture Dedicated hardware for functional units

Calculations shared amongst usersMultithreaded code works extremely well with this model!


Thinking Big: R&D Demo

Youtube link here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5iwnxoNQbY


Thinking Small: The Indie Paradox What can I do as a single programmer?

What if I don’t have a fiber connection?

What if I don’t have a supercomputer to develop on?

What if I live on an island in the middle of nowhere?

Reprinted from https://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/4087637106/


Meet the Shinra Community CDK Simple toolkit for making 2D cloud games

Works with any repository

Create & test content locally!

Push to our servers for test

Support network via GitHub Discussions & Facebook Groups

Japanese version on 5/15, English version coming shortly afterwards

More details at tech.shinra.com

tech.shinra.com


Development Types To reiterate, we are planning three different architectures: 1:1 – Simple self-deployment kit (as-is DirectX)

N:N – Shinra Community SDK (Space Sweeper)

1:N – (R&D Demo)


Timeline We are talking to developers right now!

3-month closed technical beta in Japan starting February 2015with back catalog content, Agni’s Philosophy tech demo and Space Sweeper

North American technical beta this summer

Initial platform is PC, with set-top box support planned


Wrapping things up: We are a platform that is deploying on fiber to start

We can run Windows/DirectX titles in the cloud economically

We are working on architectures for cloud-exclusive titles can make for radically different multiplayer experiences

What would you make with unlimited CPU / GPU?


Q&A

mailto:[email protected]

Shinra's Vision for Gaming / Presented at GigHacks 2015

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Transcript of Shinra's Vision for Gaming / Presented at GigHacks 2015