On Tuesday strategy game play will enter a whole new era with the release of Sega’s® Total War: Shogun™ 2. With expansive battlefields, beautiful scenery in historic Japan and even more life-like Avatars, Shogun 2 is sure to be an instant hit. While this game could work well on your current rig, playing with a recent AMD Radeon^TM graphics card across multiple monitors, you will be instantly immersed in the thrilling world of Shogun 2 set in 16^th Century Japan. Just be sure to draw your weapons quickly as you could find yourself instantly surrounded by an army of thousands in an extremely life-like experience!

Alongside Sega, we have been hard at work to really bring these games to life, so let’s take a closer look at the technologies that makes this amazingly visual and interactive gaming experience possible. Turning on all the eye candy in games is enabled with DirectX^® 11, the latest gaming API from Microsoft to provide PC gamers with the best visual experience by enabling:

• Advanced cascaded shadow mapping filtering for more detailed and ultra-realistic shadows.
• Amazing visual effects for everything including the beautiful scenery in historic Japan to more life-like and personalized Avatars.
• DirectCompute depth of field to spot enemies both near and far.
• Tessellation to smoothly handle greater rendering tasks for enhanced visual effects.

Now let’s combine these amazing visual effects and spread them across multiple-displays for a truly immersive experience! With a recent AMD Radeon graphics card and up to five monitors, you can do just that using AMD Eyefinity, a multi-display gaming technology.[1] Playing across multiple monitors, you will gain a more expansive view of the battlefields as they fill with hundreds of warriors while being able to carry out successful strategy attacks closely watching enemy movements.

To get the full experience of Shogun 2, a graphics card like the AMD Radeon HD 6870 currently runs about $200 on e-tail sites like Newegg.com, and the same DirectX 11 and AMD Eyefinity technology perks described above will also work for a huge swath of games already out, as well as a number of titles slated to hit in the next few months. For more information on how to create an AMD Eyefinity technology setup, visit AMD’s website here.

Neal Robison is the director of ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

[1] AMD Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort connectors, and/or DisplayPort compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort or Mini-DisplayPort connector(s), are required.  AMD Eyefinity technology can support up to 6 displays using a single enabled AMD Radeon™ graphics card with Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems – the number of displays may vary by board design and you should confirm exact specifications with the applicable manufacturer before purchase.  SLS (“Single Large Surface”) functionality requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays.

As a PC gamer, you’ve no doubt heard of DirectX® 11, the latest gaming API from Microsoft that lets developers turn on a whole lot more eye candy in their games.  For Dragon Age II, AMD worked closely with BioWare to implement some stunning DirectX 11 effects, including:

• Contact Hardening Shadows – A new technique for rendering more detailed and realistic shadows without lowering your frame rates.
• Gaussian Blur – Yeah, you’ve seen Gaussian blur a hundred times before, but in Dragon Age II, DirectX 11 makes use of special computing techniques for bloom effects around the sun and when magic spells are used that make them look great without degrading your game performance.
• Diffusion Depth of Field – This is a high quality depth of field effect that’s closer to the same depth of field effects they use in movie special effects.
• Tessellation – Remember when a lot of mountainous terrain looked like jagged triangles? Tessellation automatically smoothes that out.

Beyond the amazing visual effects, for a game as beautiful as Dragon Age II, many gamers want the opportunity to really be immersed, and with a recent AMD Radeon graphics card and a few spare monitors, you can do just that using a multi-display gaming technology called AMD Eyefinity.¹ Dragon Age: Origins was one of the first games to take advantage of AMD Eyefinity, and that was when the technology was still relatively immature.  Since then BioWare has worked closely with AMD to enable an even more stunning AMD Eyefinity experience, enabling both three-display and five-display gaming. Not only does this let you keep tabs on what’s going on in the battlefield through your peripheral vision, but with Dragon Age II’s new close combat system, you need to watch enemy movements more carefully to dodge blows, or quickly take shelter behind pillars or rocks to avoid powerful AOE attacks.  An AMD Eyefinity setup could just save your bacon.  And BioWare even thought of the most optimal menu and HUD placements in those multi-display setups.

If you’re a big fan of Dragon Age II and want to get the full experience, a graphics card like the AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 currently runs about $200 on e-tail sites like Newegg.com, and the same DirectX 11 and AMD Eyefinity perks described above will also work for a huge swath of games already out, as well as a number of titles slated to hit in the next few months.  For more information on how to create an AMD Eyefinity setup, check the AMD’s website here.

1. AMD Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort™ connectors, and/or DisplayPort™ compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort™ or Mini-DisplayPort™ connector(s), are required.  Support for six simultaneous displays may require complementary products compatible with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport. Maximum number of configured displays may vary – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies.  SLS (“Single Large Surface”) functionality requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays.

Neal Robison is the director of ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

In addition to showing off some yet-to-be-released game demos at our booth (Moscone Center #924 in the South Hall), we’re also hosting a few sessions where we’ll be discussing some key topics around DirectX® 11, the AMD Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and programming. And at each session, you’ll have a chance to win an AMD Radeon™ graphics card!

2011 is definitely one of the biggest years in AMD’s history of innovation, and we want to make sure you’re right there with us as we continue to make the PC gaming experience even better by enabling developers with new technologies and techniques  through our AMD Gaming Evolved program!

Neal Robison is the director of ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Features like DirectX® 11 and ATI Eyefinity technology are set to become new standards for PC gaming. But don’t just take my word for it. Recent polls on gaming sites Gamestar and HardOCP make it clear that gamers want the richer, more realistic, and more immersive graphical innovations like those that AMD products offer. So our crack developer relations team – game developers, engineers, relationship managers – is working with our technology partners to make sure the hottest games are designed to take advantage of these innovative features.

Of course, optimizing new games for graphics innovations is just one small piece of the development support we offer; we also provide developers and publishers with code, developer tools, testing, hardware, marketing support and more. We’re always proud to see a new game launch with an AMD logo on the screen or on the box or the website, knowing that we’ve helped to contribute to the game’s success.

Many of the top rated recent PC game releases (as per Metacritic, the ratings aggregator), are AMD-sponsored or supported titles including Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 (94), EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2 (90) and Codemasters’ DiRT® 2 (89). These developers and publishers had access to our testing labs and have worked hand-in-hand with our developers, with the aim of making their title even better, run on a wider range of hardware configurations, offer high frame rates, and take full advantage of immersive features like DirectX 11 and ATI Eyefinity technology.

Another measure of our developer relations team’s success. The weekly Steam sales charts are a snapshot of the games, features and experiences that gamers are looking for right now. And what they’re looking for is games that support advanced graphics features. Of the 10 top selling games on Steam for last week, eight were AMD supported, including Aliens vs. Predator – previously the fastest selling PC game of 2010, selling 130,000 units in its first weekend (it was just bumped to second fastest by Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2 – another title AMD has worked closely on, this time with DICE).  These titles offer gamers DirectX 11 graphics, incredible graphics performance, and surround sight with ATI Eyefinity support.

It’s clear that the hard work of our developers and developer relations team is having a real, tangible effect on the industry; these games are at the top of the heap, breathing new life into PC gaming by making the experience that much better.

We’re listening to you, and we’re working hard to help game studios deliver the features you want.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Today, I’d like to show you the results of our efforts, to illustrate how our developer relations team is evolving gaming, and share how our team’s work directly impacts the games you play every day.

Naturally I’m biased, but I’m insanely proud of the work our team does, working to make the industry stronger, to help our game development and publishing partners deliver better games with stunning new graphics features, optimizing games, and enabling gamers regardless of the hardware they’re running at the moment.

It’s interesting to me that some parts of the PC gaming industry are so visible – game developers talking about in-game features, weapons, and characters, publishers announcing launch dates and availability, and reviewers detailing a game’s every nuance in an epic review. But some parts of the industry play out almost entirely behind the scenes. How it happens that Crysis runs like butter on an ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series card is never asked, and how a game like Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2 quickly and easily runs in a panoramic ATI Eyefinity technology multi-display setup is often taken for granted.¹

Since we’re offering this look “behind the scenes” at how AMD’s developer relations team has an impact on your favorite games, we thought we’d offer up a few recent examples of the difference AMD has made.

As we outlined in our Gamers’ Manifesto, AMD provides its gaming partners with developer tools, lab testing, technical engagement, marketing support and more. One of the biggest, most appreciated assets that we provide is the test lab. We get game builds from our developer partners and the test lab plays through them to get the real end-user experience. This helps to find and feedback bugs to the developer, test and ensure a solid ATI Eyefinity experience, and generate single card and ATI CrossFireX™ technology performance info that’s fed back to our engineers to help with driver development. Through this process we catch most bugs long before gamers would ever know they existed.

A recent example includes the work we did with Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed® II. Our initial testing found that ATI Eyefinity support wasn’t working quite right – but the feedback we generated and our engineers’ support helped Ubisoft develop a fully optimized version within a few weeks! (You can download the patch here.)

At an event we held recently at GDC in San Francisco, Rebellion head Chris Kingsley spoke about how his studio has worked closely with AMD for over 12 years, helping them make their games as good as possible – with meetings, seminars, testing services, code, and the latest hardware to create games that are ready for the technology of today and tomorrow. You can see the fruits of this partnership in Rebellion’s most recent title, Aliens Vs. Predator™. The result of their collaboration with AMD shines through in the game’s extensive use of DirectX 11 features to add performance and visual quality over the DirectX 9 version. The Alien up close is even more terrifying with ATI Eyefinity and character tessellation resulting in a more immersive and realistic experience!

AMD also provides its development and publishing partners with marketing support. We know that their success is our success, and the more we can do to promote titles via bundling with the latest hardware, co-marketing, and advertising support, more studios will be able to keep making great PC games. A great example of this kind of support is the recent announcement of our GPU and CPU sponsorship of Activision’s Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 2 which comes bundled with the newest member of the ATI Radeon family, the ATI Radeon™ HD 5830.

So, armed with this knowledge, I hope the next time you sit in front of your gaming rig, and fire up the latest AAA title, you’ll take a moment to appreciate all of the hard work that goes on “behind the scenes” to evolve your gaming experience.

1. ATI Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort™ connectors, and/or DisplayPort™ compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort™ or Mini-DisplayPort™ connector(s), are required.

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

AMD today announced a new name and identify for its long-running developer relations program designed to clearly distinguish it in the hearts and minds of gamers, game developers, and other AMD technology partners.  AMD Gaming Evolved is a reflection of AMD’s ongoing commitment to gamers and a symbol of the depth of technical and marketing engagement AMD has with game developers the world over.

At the core of AMD Gaming Evolved is the Gamers’ Manifesto, a group of guiding principles that define what AMD does for the gaming industry and game developers, and how it does it.  It’s a set of values that hold AMD true to one of its most important audience: gamers.   Here are the four tenants of the Gamers’ Manifesto that AMD lives by:

1. Driving innovation: Innovation is aligned with the needs and wants of the gaming community.

Gamers have seen this time and again from AMD with technologies such as:

• Alternate Frame Rendering for multi-GPU gaming in 1999, resulting in higher frame rates
• TruForm in 2001, resulting in more detailed 3D models and eventually led to tessellation being adopted in DirectX 11
• 3Dc in 2004, a technology used for the compression of normal maps, is now a part of DirectX 10 and widely used by game developers
• Advances in GDDR3/4/5 memory standards driven by head of the DRAM committee, AMD’s Joe Macri, which has contributed to higher frame rates and image quality settings due to greater memory bandwidth
• AMD contributing significant IP to the DisplayPort standard

2. Industry standards: We will participate in the development of standards and wherever possible act quickly to move our innovations into industry standards with the goal of creating a robust, common gaming platform.

Gamers have seen this from AMD with:

• OpenGL
• JEDEC for GDDR memory
• Khronos Group for OpenCL
• DirectX

This open standards-based approach differentiates AMD from other vendors who choose to focus on closed, proprietary standards that lock gamers into a particular platform for purposes of driving continued sales.

3. Supporting PC game developers and the PC gaming industry: We provide the technical and business support game developers need to help the PC gaming industry thrive.

AMD provides the following services to game developers around the world in an open, flexible and  mutually beneficial fashion:

• Technical engagement, including referenceable source code, and access to game builds for competing vendors
• Developer tools
• Product development
• Lab testing
• Marketing programs
• Support and integration with our partners

4. Putting gamers first: At the heart of all of our efforts is the mandate to make gamers’ experiences better – those with AMD hardware in their system, or not, deserve the best gaming experience possible.

Where innovation, industry standards and developer support intersect is where gamers are perhaps impacted most.  AMD approaches every gamer as a potential AMD customer down the road, and by putting gamers at the heart of virtually everything we do, there are tremendous benefits for all concerned:

• AMD’s innovation combined with our support of industry standards makes our breakthroughs available to a broad number of gamers
• AMD’s innovation combined with our efforts to support developers sees our roadmaps aligned to help ensure that developers have the hardware necessary to run the games they want to
• Our efforts to support developers and our commitment to industry standards helps create a large install base for PC game developers to address

For more information on the AMD Gaming Evolved program, please read my other post from today, here.

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you know that AMD is a “gaming company”.  Yes, we make the hardware that enables great console and PC gaming experiences, and we make professional-grade hardware that development studios use to design and build evermore impressive games, but we also consider ourselves a gaming company because we’re game developers ourselves.  Yes, despite all of our hardware prowess, AMD employs a team of ace game developers that toil tirelessly behind the scenes to provide the support our technology partners need to deliver some of the great graphics and game play that you know and love.

If you’ve ever read a review of a new CPU or GPU architecture, you know how complicated new platform technology can be.  With a myriad of programming methods available (APIs for the geeks like me out there), and new features being constantly introduced to those programming methods, it can be tough for our game developer technology partners to know how best to take advantage of AMD’s new hardware.  Who better to show them than AMD’s game developer squad?

Being a gamer, I’m sure you’ve seen video interviews with tons of producers, designers and developers of your favorite games.  The one thing they all have in common is passion.  Sure, they’re all paid to do a job, and yes, the companies they work for are in business to make money, but in every interview with someone responsible for making a game, the one thing you walk away with is how crazy they are about their game, and how much they want it to be perfect so that gamers like you absolutely love the experience.  That same passion describes AMD’s game developer team to a T.  We love games, and we love gamers, in large part because we’re gamers ourselves.

This week in San Francisco, the video game world is converging for one its most interesting shows of the year: the Game Developer Conference.  The show brings together developer talent from all corners of the globe who come to learn new tips and tricks that will inevitably inspire and impact the development of games that get released in the months and years to come.  There are tons of sessions on lessons learned from past games, how to make games look and play better, and of course, the parties. Think of it as a big group hug for the development community.  The way AMD sees it, there’s no better time or place to give developers and gamers an inside look at the code that AMD’s developer relations team lives by, something we call the Gamers’ Manifesto.

At its core, the Gamers’ Manifesto defines what AMD does for the gaming industry and game developers, and how we do it.  It’s a set of guiding principles that hold us true to our most important audience: you the gamers.  And we’re okay with that because, like I said, we’re gamers too.  I invite you to read through it.  I promise that by the end, you’ll know just what we’re made of, and how AMD’s approach differs from others’ in the industry.

While we’ve been living those values for years, today I’m also excited to announce that our developer program gets a new name and identity – one that will clearly distinguish it in the hearts and minds of the gaming community.  I’d like to introduce you to “AMD Gaming Evolved”.

AMD Gaming Evolved perfectly captures the essence of what we do as whole at AMD.  With every technology we introduce, with every industry standards meeting we go to, with every game we work on, and with every partner bundle we put in place, our goal is to steadily evolve the gaming experience, making it incrementally better for everyone without adversely affecting the industry or gamers.  As part of AMD’s Fusion Partner Program, AMD Gaming Evolved will see the same support as other partner-related activities.  Resources across the company are focused on making AMD’s developer relations efforts even more of a success than they’ve been to date.  That means that if you like the experience of Call of Duty^®: Modern Warfare^® 2, Dragon Age™: Origins or Supreme Commander^® 2 on the latest ATI Radeon graphics hardware, we’ve got lots more in store for you.

If you like the idea of an inside look into what makes AMD’s developer
team tick, then the fun doesn’t stop here. Later this week, I’ll be back
to talk about the work we do and how AMD’s developer program has had,
and all of the good it’s brought gamers like you and game developers
around the world by sticking to our guns and being all about the gamers.
I’ll also be posting about some of the recent successes we’ve had. It
may surprise you to know that AMD’s developer team has been involved
with almost every major PC game that’s come out in the last year.

In the meantime, have a read of the Gamers’ Manifesto, and let me know what you think!

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

March marks a bit of an inflection point in PC gaming.  This month sees three of world’s leading game publishers bringing DirectX 10.1 games to market – a sign that developers are increasingly recognizing the quality and performance benefits that can be gained through DirectX 10.1, something we’ve already seen with GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky.  Earlier this month, Ubisoft released Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. to strong reviews, and next week will see the release of EA’s BattleForge and SEGA’s Stormrise.  All three games make use of DirectX 10.1 and from our early looks, offer up either higher frames-per-second performance, better image quality or both compared to being played on DirectX 10 hardware.  Definitely check them out.

Apart from all of the new games coming out, this month also plays host to the annual Game Developer Conference, giving developers a chance to show off new previews of forthcoming games.  For AMD and a lot of other companies, Game Developer Conference, or GDC as it’s more commonly known, is a chance to tackle the pressing issues facing game makers today.  The conference takes place this week in San Francisco, and interestingly I think we’re about to see another industry inflection point, one that once-and-for-all looks to knock down proprietary hardware barriers, and focus on standards-based approaches to game development.  All game developers are looking for ways to make the most of their development resources – taking advantage of industry standards is a big part of that.  While I can’t giveaway all our news just yet, it’s safe to say that AMD will be a key contributor to that conversation this week.

As a bit of a preview, if you’ll be at GDC and you’re planning the sessions you’d like to attend, definitely make sure to get this one on your calendar for next Thursday, March 26.  Game physics once again returns to the spotlight at GDC as I’ll be joined on stage by OTOY’s Jules Urbach to explore standards-based game physics using OpenCL and ATI Stream technology, and the developer implications of server-side rendering using AMD Fusion Render Cloud.  As a bonus, AMD’s Ward Tisdale will talk about how AMD is working with developers to make games accessible and educational through our “Changing the Game” program.  Lastly, if you’re a Richard Huddy fan – and let’s face it, who isn’t? – join us at GamesBeat 2009 right around the corner on Tuesday to hear about the future of gaming hardware.  Info on the 4 p.m. session can be found here.

Between a glut of fantastic DirectX 10.1 games, and the renewed emphasis on standards-based approaches to game development, hopefully you’ll agree with me that there’s a lot more change in the air this March than just the weather.

Neal Robison is Director, ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.