AI on the GPU: InstinctTech DogFighter CudaDemo - briefly
(hx) 09:37 AM CEST - Sep,04 2009
Instinct Technology has collaborated with Dark Water Studios to create a movie showing how their middleware product Instinct Studio is able to use NVIDIA’s CUDA technology to offload AI from the CPU onto the GPU of the graphics card. The trailer shows GPU-controlled flocking behavior in DogFighter that allowed them to display a ridiculous (as in over 4000) number of aircraft on the screen at once, all controlled by a single CUDA-enabled graphics card. (thanks BluesNews)
The demo shows 4096 bot planes handled solely on a single GPU parallel to game rendering. The bot planes use steering behaviours for flocking, navigation and obstacle avoidance. The planes are fully lit and rendered (with shadows). The demo runs with interactive frame rate on main stream CUDA enabled graphics cards. In comparison the same simulation without utilizing CUDA achieved a similar frame rate on a decent machine with only 512 planes in our tests. The steering computation for 512 planes requires about 260.000 neighbour queries while for 4096 planes this grows to a whopping 16 Million queries. The algorithm can be easily parallelized, explaining the advantage of technologies like CUDA for this kind of problem. Even if there is a potential to optimize the algorithm for CPU the clear benefit for us is a heavily reduced development time.
last 10 comments:
psolord
(01:29 PM CEST - Sep,04 2009 )
Where can i download this?
lmer
(01:39 AM CEST - Sep,06 2009 )
Flocking really isn't really an intensive or complex algorithm. You define a vector of movement, some dispersion parameters and just traverse the array with each update. 4000 isn't an impressive number in this case. What will be impressive on the other hand is the amount of bullcrap nVidia is gonna spew over this in their upcoming marketing campaigns for CUDA.