Long before the work-from-home mandate resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, game developers and other design professionals were working collaboratively no matter where they were located. This means high-performance workstations capable of running critical applications and supporting demanding workflows on the go.

Computer chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. to meet these demands in the cloud. Amazon EC2 G4ad instances powered by AMD help gamers achieve high levels of productivity without the impracticality, risk and expense of deploying numerous high-capex workstations for use in the office, on the road and at home, according to George Watkins (pictured), product marketing manager for visual cloud and datacenter GPU at AMD.

“The cloud, and then obviously in this case, the AWS cloud, with the G4ad instances, really does bring the whole pipeline together,” he said. “It brings the data sets and the virtual workstations … as well as all the applications into one place. It’s all centralized, and from an IT perspective, this is fantastic. And, actually, sending out a workstation now is really simple. It’s login details into an email to your new staff, and there’s some really great benefits as well from a staff perspective.”

Watkins spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how AMD and AWS accelerate game development in the cloud, as well as how their tools improve pipeline efficiency and time-to-market. (* Disclosure below.)

Faster time-to-market

In addition to giving game developers the computing power and speed they need to innovate, G4ad instances provide flexibility, efficiency and faster time-to-market, according to Watkins.

“A good example of this is, if an artist is using or working on a very, very heavy dataset and the configuration from their VM or virtual workstation isn’t up to snuff because of such a large dataset, all they need to do is call up IT and say, ‘I need more resource,’” Watkins said. “And, literally, in a couple of minutes’ time, they can actually have that resource, again, improving that productivity, reducing that time.”

Another resource to increase efficiency is Unreal Swarm. It reduces the time needed to turn lightmaps into a game by automatically scaling the compiling process in the AWS cloud. So instead of doing this on the local station using traditional CPU and memory resource, which would take about 50 minutes, game developers can complete the task in the cloud in about four minutes, according to Watkins.

“This type of task that you would typically see with a 3D artist or with a programmer basically happens multiple times a day. So when you start factoring in a saving of 45 minutes multiple times a day, it starts really bringing down the amount of time saved, and obviously the amount of cost saved as well for that artist’s time,” Watkins said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AMD nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE