Remedy Licenses Umbra for Alan Wake

Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment has licensed Umbra Software's rendering optimization middleware for its upcoming Xbox 360 title Alan Wake. Umbra, the company's "flagship" product, is GPU-accelerated, and intended to boost rendering performance and speed content creation for rich game worlds on Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3. The company says it increases framerates by determining the set of visible objects on each frame, and renders only visible objects in order to improve performance on both CPU and GPU. According to Umbra Software, it does all processing at runtime, and allows developers to add, remove and move objects at run-time without significantly affecting performance. "With Umbra's culling technology, Remedy's team can add more details to Alan Wake's world and concentrate on the cool visuals while minimizing tedious work such as adding portals," says Remedy development director Markus Maki. "It's been a pleasure working with Remedy on Alan Wake," adds Umbra CEO Marko Nurro.