AMD is currently working on a new technology that aims to decrease the size of games on disk, as well as reduce the size of game patches and updates. Many of today's AAA games are well over 100 GB in size, with updates reaching tens of gigabytes. Some major updates essentially require players to download the entire game again. For example, the upcoming game Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is said to be over 300 GB in size, making it difficult for players with slower internet connections to access. The majority of a game's size is due to visual assets like textures, sprites, and cutscene videos. A single AAA title can contain hundreds of thousands of individual game assets, including redundant sets of textures for different image quality settings.
AMD's solution to this issue is their Neural Block Compression technology. The company will delve into the details of this technology at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (July 3-5). While specifics are not yet available, the concept involves consolidating the various layers of textures used in modern games (such as specular maps, normal maps, roughness maps) into a single asset format. The game engine can then separate these layers using an AI neural network. This approach differs from mega-textures, which rely on a single large texture covering all objects in a scene. Instead, AMD's technology focuses on flattening the data layers of individual textures and maps into a single asset type. While this may increase computational costs on the client's end, it is expected to result in significant reductions in file size.
