Mainframe

About Mainframe

Mainframe is an independent, venture-backed game developer. The team is bringing together veterans from places like CCP, Next Games, Blizzard Entertainment, Ubisoft, Rovio, and Remedy. The studio is set on reimagining an MMO for this decade: a social sandbox designed with human interaction at its core, offering new ways of playing with friends. Mainframe’s team is distributed across Europe, with offices in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris.

The Challenge

Mainframe runs extremely complex Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) code and shader compilations in its development environment. The company invested heavily in several AMD Threadripper workstations to provide greater compute power, reduce time spent waiting for builds to complete, and allow more time for development and the creation of amazing games. An additional challenge is Mainframe’s distributed nature, with teams across Europe requiring resources to complete their tasks with the company’s cloud environment.

How Incredibuild helped – harnessing the collective power of Threadrippers

To empower its developers to build the best possible game, Mainframe turned to Incredibuild to help accelerate some of its more resource intensive processes. The company connected its Threadripper cores to the Incredibuild grid to harness their collective power, using Incredibuild’s acceleration tools to maximize its developer teams’ efficiency. Mainframe was able to shorten development times and reduce bottlenecks and wait times to enhance productivity.

The studio also used Incredibuild 10’s smart licenses to flexibly manage their resource needs and allocate compute power to each team exactly when they needed it. Most importantly, Mainframe was able to use Incredibuild while working from home, which allowed them to avoid bandwidth and processing power issues and continue to develop their game without any delays.

Bottom line

Even with the most powerful hardware available, Incredibuild is an invaluable asset for game development teams. By maximizing the utilization of its resources, Mainframe was able to accelerate their iteration loops from two hours to just 15 minutes, letting its developers do more and with higher quality.