There's certainly been a lot of money flowing towards advertising in games lately.  As recently reported in BusinessWeek, a new PriceWaterhouseCoopers report claims the industry itself will grow to almost $32 Billion by 2011.  So it's not surprising that related claims of the the in-game advertising portion of those revenues growing to almost $2 Billion in the same timeframe don't seem unreasonable.  Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Massive, would it?

But with all this spending comes the deeper question: does it actually make an impact?  Marketers are all-too-aware of that hoary old adage: "I know half my advertising budget is wasted…I just don't know which half".  Does in-game advertising, while certainly reaching a measurable audience (just look at Nielsen's new GamePlay Metrics ratings system), actually have a measurable (and positive) impact on the advertisers' brands?

Well, two new studies are pointing us to a qualified "yes".  The first is a recently released study by IBM's own Jasper Juhl, a computer scientist in the Denmark office.  He studied over 100 players on the EA's "Need for Speed Underground 2" on PS2, and found the following:

In the test, people…were exposed to in-game advertising during the game. The results demonstrated a much bigger recognition effect than with the TV medium, which is partly due to the concentration that the players must display in order to follow the game. "Concentration increases the effect. This is also what you see in TV commercials where they use for instance humor and sound level to capture the viewers’ attention. In computer games it is a built-in requirement, and this means that the effect is bigger,” says Jasper.

The second is from Massive.  A press release from August 7 claims that Brand "familiarity" (is that a new term for "brand awareness"?) from in-game advertising can increase up to 64%.  From studing 600 North American gamers playing EA's "Need for Speed: Carbon", they found that: 

 …the study revealed that, from control to test groups:
* Average brand familiarity increased by 64 percent
* Average brand rating increased by 37 percent
* Average purchase consideration increased by 41 percent
* Average ad recall increased by 41 percent

Now, both of these studies were based on EA's racing game Need for Speed (albeit different versions).  And I tend to be skeptical of study results that are published via press wires and that happen to validate the business model of the company issuing the press release.  What's more important is that there are multiple studies now showing that in-game advertising indeed does have an impact, though it's too early to tell under which circumstances it's more effective than other media and for which types of products and services.  I believe when you see that level of sophistication is when you'll REALLY see the in-game advertising market take off.

I recently ran across an interesting paper, Stackless KD-Tree Traversal for High Performance GPU Ray Tracing, which documented the strides made by GPU based ray-tracing over the last decade and introduced a new way of mapping acceleration structure traversal to modern GPUs, namely Nvidia's new G80. The paper was authored by Philipp Slusallek's talented computer graphics group at Saarland University in Germany. Our own Cell iRT ray-tracer was based on papers written by Philipp's students so we have great respect for their work. It was interesting to see the great lengths researchers are willing to go through in order to harvest a fraction of the floating point potential locked away in these black boxes.   

From 10,000 feet here's how the Cell processor stacks up to Nvidia's new G80 GPU:

Both parts are compared at 90-nanometre.  

As you can see the G80 is twice as big, which is a good indication it requires twice the power, and produces twice the floating point power on paper.  However when we ran one of the benchmarks discussed in the paper, the Stanford Bunny, we found that the Cell processor when combined with the iRT produces significantly better performance (we don't have access to the other datasets listed in the paper):

Left to Right:  

2.6 GHz AMD Opteron - Saarland Ray-tracer

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX - Saarland Ray-tracer

Sony Playstation3 (partial 3.2 GHz Cell processor running Linux) - IBM iRT

3.2 GHz Cell Processor - IBM iRT

IBM QS20 Blade (Two 3.2 GHz Cell Processors) - IBM iRT  

In fact one Cell processor is four to five times faster at ray-tracing the Stanford Bunny than the G80 and the Cell QS20 blade, which has comparable floating point power on paper, is eight to eleven times faster.  Both the G80 and Cell crush the AMD Opteron at ray-tracing which is arguably the most popular production rendering processor today. It's also interesting to note that secondary rays are less costly on Cell which is where ray-tracing becomes interesting.  Primary ray cast is only interesting from an academic perspective. The real issue is secondary rays and GPUs have traditionally had problems with these do to their incoherent nature. When you factor power into the equation it gets even more interesting, given that Cell is half the size of the G80 and produces five times the ray-tracing performance.  

Things are starting to get interesting and Intel is hot on the trail with their Larrabee part which is said to be designed for ray-tracing.  

Only time will tell….

We have now released a standalone version of the iRT for the Cell processor.  The downloadable Linux binary runs on both the Sony Playstation3 (PS3) and the IBM QS20 blade.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/irt

This demonstration program shows both the ray-tracing potential of the Cell processor and the scalability of code written using the Cell SDK.  Under Linux, the PS3 only has access to 6 of Cells 8 SPEs and has no access to the RSX graphics processing unit. Despite this the iRT can software ray-trace a 333,000 triangle car at interactive frame rates and can spin the 69,000 triangle Stanford bunny around in 720p at better than 40 frames per second. The iRT is also highly scalable, the IBM QS20 blade runs 2.5 time faster than the Linux PS3 and performance continues to scale linearly as additional QS20 blades are added.
 
On the alphaWorks site you will find the demonstration program plus two data sets, have fun!

Time flies when you're having fun. And what's more fun than the industry we're in? I don't know if I would characterize Trade Shows as part of that fun, but it's certainly a chance to meet our industry peers, friends and even sworn enemies. And since for most of us, working in the Games industry is very much fun, it's not too much of a stretch.