Binary GPU-Planning for Thousands of NPCs
Stéphane Cardon, Éric Jacopin · 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) · 2020
Game Artificial Intelligence Engines of commercial games run on CPUs and not on GPUs. With more and more powerful GPUs and Cloud gaming, our vision is that GPUs will become the dedicated Game AI hardware, just as it now provides computing power for Game Physics (e.g. nVidia PhysX). In particular, we believe GPUs can run Game AI Planning, which computes plans in order to control the behaviors of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in video-games. Our objective is an efficient online GPU-based Game AI Planning component with Cloud gaming as a target. We here report on our most recent implementation which can control thousands of NPCs each frame with only one GTX 1080 on the AI server, pushing thousands of plans to the client (PC or console).