Epic Games and AMD Boost Remote Developer Productivity and Creativity


With the rise of gaming in Europe, developers are also keeping busy, currently forced to work remotely. However, productivity is at stake when the pandemic has forced developers and engineers to telecommute. Due to the limitations of the computing hardware used in homes, teams often have less time to create and test new functions. With more powerful technology that can keep up with them, teams can dedicate their time and talents to more creative and higher-value work.

AMD has announced a new case study with Epic Games, the company behind  Fortnite, as well as Unreal Engine 4, which was used in  The Mandalorian,  Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker,   HBO's Game of Thrones, and  Westworld. Staying at the top of the game design industry requires a combination of creative talent and the strategic implementation of technology that helps teams embrace remote work.


Improved productivity of remote work

Epic Games needed engineers to be able to work quickly and efficiently from home during the pandemic, and began deploying Threadripper and Threadripper PRO workstations. The new Threadripper CPUs have so many cores and offer so much speed that the team's engineers and developers have been able to work on multiple projects at once, unlike before.

“While users at the office saved 10-15 minutes,” says Pat Swanson, a computer engineer at Epic Games, “users at home saved hours. After that, many users were so excited about the numbers their peers were getting that they went out to buy their own Threadripper CPUs for their home setups. "

The Epic team reports that the move to Threadripper CPUs has generated a huge buzz. "There is nothing else that can compare to what the Threadripper 3990X CPU does in any price range," says Swanson. “I could ask another manufacturer to send me a $ 20,000 chip, and the Threadripper is going to continue to match or exceed it. Not that money is a barrier in this case, but the price-performance ratio is uneven. It's a no-brainer ”.

Accelerate workflows

Epic Games needed to streamline the code compilation process and achieve faster iteration and shadowing times. The ability to quickly compile and repeat code was critical to quality, but the team could not find a solution that offered high clock speed and high parallelism simultaneously.

The replacement of the previous CPUs by AMD Ryzen Threadripper was "a watershed moment". In the case of Unreal Engine, in an internal test of building software executable engines, competing CPUs took 46 minutes and 43 seconds, while a Threadripper 3970X with 32 cores took just 15 minutes and 12 seconds, less than a third of the time.

An important union between both firms. You can check the case study here.

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