Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort.<p>So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Current-gen consoles also all have NVMe SSDs.<p>Given this trend, RAD's heyday was definitely in the days before consoles had NVMe disks (Bink in particular let games punch far above their weight) so this might be a nice forever-home.<p>Blame Intel for not making faster CPUs, and consumers for tolerating massive install sizes, i guess.<p>The other angle to this story is that the PS5 has a hardware decode unit for RAD Kraken. To get the best use out of the PS5 hardware, it's essential that the encoder is still made available. This is a huge competitive moat. (PCs probably won't get a comparable decompression accelerator card and such a card wouldn't get enough market penetration anyway.)