Finnish game tech company Umbra announced today that its Umbra software development kit will be used to boost the graphics performance of the upcoming game Warhammer: End Times Vermintide.
Fatshark, the Stockholm-based game studio, has licensed Umbra’s technology, the Umbra Cloud, to make the game run faster and more efficiently on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC platforms. Fatshark is using the Stingray game engine developed by Autodesk to make the game, and Stingray includes Umbra’s occlusion culling technology, which ensures that only the visible objects in every frame of a game are being processed and rendered. The result is optimized performance ensuring better graphics quality and frame rates.
Helsinki, Finland-based Umbra said it has created a scalable tech that enables teams of all types to use it.
“After evaluating Umbra, it became apparent that it was the best solution for our need. In many ways, using methods like Umbra’s has always felt like the ‘right’ or at least best solution to a complex problem,” said Rikard Blomberg, deputy CEO at Fatshark, in a statement. “Now after we have gotten more experience handling the technology, we have also realized that it is not just about culling. We have come to see the technology more as an alternative representation of game data that is structured to be very efficient for a certain subset of problems. By integrating it in the Autodesk Stingray Engine for Vermintide, we are able to render at high frame-rates without sacrificing graphics quality. It has also sped up and simplified our production pipeline.”
Umbra creates an optimized database from 3D data and processes it automatically based on the answers to queries such as what can be seen at a given location in a game at any given moment. It also figures out what part of the scene needs to be rendered next.
“We are very happy that our technology can help Fatshark to play a part in helping them to realize their vision in Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide” said Otso Mäkinen, chief technology officer of Umbra, in a statement.