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Crysis 2: Everything about DirectX 11, 3D without perfomance-drop and 8-core-optimization
At the Gamescom 2010 PC Games Hardware was given the opportunity of gathering detailed information on CryEngine 3 which will be used in Crysis 2: DirectX 11 including compute shader and tessellation, multicore-rendering, stereoscopic 3D, cinematic effects and more.
Please keep in mind: The following details are referring to CryEngine 3 (CE3) in general and can't necessarily be linked with Crysis 2!
At gamescom 2010, Crytek's field applications engineer Sean Tracy showed to PC Games Hardware a live demonstration of CryEngine 3 in stereoscopic 3D. Of course in real-time ("What You See Is What You Play") within the powerful editor Sandbox 3. Instead of rendering each picture twice (=half the framerate!) and projecting it on a dedicated 120Hz LCD monitor, Crytek simply uses the back buffer and the depth information in the graphics card: The rendered frame is practically being cloned and the fractum shift procedure makes two out of it. Thus, on the one hand there is nearly no performance drop and on the other hand stereoscopic 3D might be possible on any display - no matter if it's on PC or consoles. Crytek calls this technology "Screen Space Re-Projection Stereo".
Crysis 2: Technological fireworks
On an Xbox 360 or a PS3, Crysis 2 runs at 1280x720 (720p) without anti-aliasing at 30 fps (vertically synchronised; whether double- or triple-buffering was enabled Sean couldn't tell us). The CryEngine 3 maxim corresponds with what John Carmack said about id Tech 5 engine (Rage): due to the consoles the engineers had to massively optimize the engine. Deferred lighting, for example, demands lots of input performance but it allows displaying very many light sources, plus dynamic shadows. One can also expect CE3 to use multi-core CPUs to full capacity. In short: at comparable graphics the game will run more smoothly than its predecessors based on CE2. The presentation was done on a Core i7-920 with 6GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 260 using DirectX 9. As far as we've seen it, the demonstration ran smoothly - despite some toying around with the effects in Sandbox 3.
So, Sean showed us the implementation of many light sources in deferred lighting, plus real-time shadows, particles, the AI, the reengineered physics and some other cool features such as the scripting system. As already mentioned, the demonstration ran on DirectX 9. But Cryengine 3 also packs DirectX 10 and DX11, and in a few months it will be delivered to the first licencees. The most important feature are the compute shaders that will accelerate the computing of deferred lighting and post-effects. The engineers are still experimenting on tessellation but we expect it to be seen in Crysis 2.
Crysis 2: Up to 8 CPU cores can be used
When it comes to cinematic effects, CE3 includes everything there is: ambient occlusion, depth of field, (object) motion blur, even the bokeh filter. In addition it is highly optimized for multi-core systems: rendering, audio, AI, physics and so on are parallelised and accelerated in the game - up to eight cores would be used. Sean assured us, that CryEngine 3 would render nearly twice as many fps as CE2 at comparable graphics quality.
The PC version will probably support multi-sampling AA as well as the so-called morphological anti-aliasing. When we asked if the textures would have a higher resolution, Sean shrugged - which can be interpreted as a "yes".
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I think it's fair to say that the Cryengine 3 is the most powerful game engine to date, and when developers get to grips with it, it's going to produce some mindblowing games. Crytek ftw. :D
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