Meanwhile, the company has also announced that they have inked a major technology and marketing partnership deal with publisher Bethesda. Publisher deals in one form or another are rather common in this industry – with both good and bad outcomes for all involved – however what makes the AMD deal notable is the scale. In what AMD is calling a “first of its kind” deal, the companies aren’t inking a partnership over just one or two games, but rather they have formed what AMD is presenting as a long term, deep technology partnership, making this partnership much larger than the usual deals.
The biggest focus here for the two companies is on
Vulkan, Khronos’s low-level graphics API. Vulkan has been out for just over a year now and due to the long development cycle for games is still finding its footing. The most well-known use right now is as an alternative rendering path for Bethesda/id’s Doom. AMD and Bethesda want to get Vulkan in all of Bethesda’s games in order to leverage the many benefits of low-level graphics APIs
we’ve been talking about over the past few years. For AMD this not only stands to improve the performance of games on their graphics cards (though it should be noted, not exclusively), but it also helps to spur the adoption of better multi-threaded rendering code. And AMD has
an 8-core processor they’re chomping at the bit to start selling in a few days…
From a deal making perspective, the way most of these deals work is that this means AMD will be providing Bethesda’s studios with engineers and other resources to help integrate Vulkan support and whatever other features the two entities want to add to the resulting games. Not talked about in much detail at the Capsaicin event was the marketing side of the equation. I’d expect that AMD has a lock on including Bethesda games as part of promotional game bundles, but I’m curious whether there will be anything else to it or not.
