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Comment by randtrain34 | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in what RAD Game Tools actually makes, as far as I understood from their website (http://www.radgametools.com/):

Bink 2 - video codec Oodle - data compression suite Telemetry - profiling toolkit Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

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Basically any game you've played that has any pre-rendered video (for cutscenes, logos, whatever) most likely uses Bink video for it.

Their stuff is very well regarded and widely used.

At least that is the impression I have got, watching from outside the industry. It's always possible that I've got a distorted view as an outsider.

> Basically any game you've played that has any pre-rendered video (for cutscenes, logos, whatever) most likely uses Bink video for it.

Unless it was a DOS game from the 90s, in which case it may have used its 256 color predecessor Smacker.

It's amazing how this tiny company has managed to stay relevant through decades of huge technological shifts.

You need extra newlines. Reformatted:

Bink 2 - video codec

Oodle - data compression suite

Telemetry - profiling toolkit

Granny 3D - toolkit for building 3d games

Miles Sound System 10 - sound authoring toolset in 2D and 3D

It doesn't appear to be mentioned on the site, but they also collaborated with Sony to develop the hardware decompression unit in the Playstation 5

Sony hardware engineers put in a herculean effort designing the awesome custam hardware decompression chip, but it was more or less just implementing the existing oodle algorithm, which they licensed. more like a translation of an existing book than writing a new work.

What’s amazing is they have made these same products for like...25 years?

Pretty much. Though they've periodically updated them to use new techniques like animation blending. I think there's also a lot of work in optimizing for different platforms. And perhaps more importantly, there's a lot of work in making the middle ware easy to integrate. Ease of integration is often more important than performance for a lot of middleware.

I've seen their logo on tons of games. I never knew they were a local company (Kirkland, WA near Seattle).

Not geezer splaining you, but they had a fairly heavy advert presence in gamdev magazine and dr dobbs. They are right behind Attachmate in being a big software outfit in Seattle.

Really hoping epic takes the opportunity to give Bink a more open license, to be honest. Much as I appreciate how advanced Bink was at the time, i don't know any dev that still use it given that av1 and such are just Good Enough.

shows up on cyberpunk 2077 splash screen

Bink isn't the codec, though that's good too, it's the software stack. How do you render AV1 on a PS4 or a Nintendo Switch, synchronize it with the audio stream? No, seriously, tell me.

GStreamer with its ridiculous threading architecture and lock-heavy approach? You think that's going to run on a console CPU? ffmpeg / libavcodec? Yes, we can hook that up, have it crank out YUV buffers and display those on the GPU, or we can just use Bink. Yes, it costs a ton of money, but based on when I evaluated it last, it was almost twice as fast as libvpx on our target platforms, it was well-suited for games (worked well with custom allocation strategies, didn't start a bunch of threads by itself, integrated well into our renderer), was easy to integrate, the toolchain was lovely, and when we needed help with a bug, we got an email back the same day from Jeff. RAD's support is top-notch.

Multimedia is not too big of a problem that a company like Epic can probably spend a few days integrating libvpx and opus to make a custom video solution, but big enough that most smaller studios with custom engines don't have time to spend on that, and those are the sort of problems that RAD likes to tackle.

PS4 and Switch both have hardware decoders (though neither would be using AV1 in particular due to age). I'm not sure about how it works on PS4 but on Switch games just use NVDEC like a PC with Nvidia hardware would and the functionality is exposed in the SDK. You can use h.264, h.265, VP8, and VP9 (the hardware supports more but it's not exposed).

When Bink was released and the PS2 and Gamecube were on the horizon this kind of thinking was needed. When you get to PS4/Switch you're just running consumer PCs. The exact same Nvidia SoC used in the Switch is actually used by Nvidia for their Shield Android TV boxes whose literal purpose is to play audio/video streams - it's quite capable of doing so.

I can't go into more detail because these platforms do not have any public documentation, but this is not true, you cannot use NVDEC. And it doesn't cover audio or synchronization.

Without referencing non-public documentation https://yuzu-emu.org/entry/yuzu-nvdec-emulation/

"The Switch uses NVDEC along with VIC (Video Image Composer) in the GPU for video decoding. Games are exposed to higher level APIs by Nintendo which abstract the configuration of these modules."

If you're using a custom engine which does not want to use these APIs you're of course free to do it yourself (and deal with how you're going to syncronize it and the higher resource utilization) but most major titles use the built in hardware decoder provided via the API.

Just curious, is there any reason MS/SIE console (AMD custom SoC) won't implement hardware RAD decoder? From what I read from this submission, their codec is good and used everywhere so it looks like it's better to have HW decoder.

Gstreamer and FFMpeg would certainly run on a Switch, a PS4, or whatever else. We know this because it runs on devices with the same processor.

That said, yes, Bink certainly is a more turnkey solution, which can definitely make business sense to use. This is a byproduct of consoles being closed platforms.

When I say "run", I mean "runs at target performance". Yes, sure, Turing completeness technically means that software raytracing "runs" on the Switch, we all know that, but it's not a viable solution for a shipping product.

This is not a biproduct of consoles being closed platforms, multimedia is a challenge everywhere; cross-platform, usable multimedia playback lacks a high quality product even on open PC platforms.

FFMpeg and Gstreamer both run on both Nvidia Tegra hardware and AMD Jaguar/Bulldozer at 4K 60fps.

Gstreamer is more suited for filtering/FX and media overlays.

That's true, but on the Bulldozer/GCN system I had as well as the Jetson I played with it was still able to decode 4K 60fps video.

SDL has always been the stack of reference when implementing your own engine, as far as I've seen in game dev. Now that is probably not the case for AAA games like cyberpunk etc, I don't follow as much tech there. But yeah, I've never seen gstreamer used for that. Curious if you can elaborate bout your experience especially wrt. the switch like you were mentioning downthread, I'm super curious.

doom uses bink cyberpunk uses bink

Almost all of these logos show up at the beginnings of my games. Cyberpunk most recently comes to mind.

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