CryENGINE 3

Fran,
The footage is really screaming for some AA. A while back you said you thought tiling on the 360 was a "solved" problem. Time to work some of your magic.:)

Good call on the quote :)
I remember I wrote in the past that Tiling on 360 is a solved problem, in the sense that a pretty optimal solution to implementing it exists.
I'm not sure anymore that Tiling is the "right" solution to the AA problem on 360. And I would also extend this to MSAA in general. It feels somehow wrong having to spend so much memory to store fragments and then use it effectively only for edges. Memory spent for MSAA on 360 translates directly to the processing cost involved in Tiling.
If I take this memory/speed hit, I want FSAA and much better quality over all.

I'm toying now with EdgeAA and in my opinion it looks very promising both in terms of speed and quality. We'll see how it goes.

Yes, you have to process the geometry twice (at least), once for each tile.

Actually most of the geometry is predicated to a single tile and doesn't have to be processed once for each tile. It's still 10/15% of the geometry and some fillrate though. It could amount to few milliseconds on the overall frametime.
 
I have a question. Crytek says that the engine is going to target next-gen consoles as well, because it's scalable. How they are planning to do that without rewriting the engine for a new and possibly vastly different architecture ? Or maybe they know something about PS4/X720 that we don't ? :)
 
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So from what i understand its...

CE3 (PC) >> CE2 (PC) >> CE3 (Consoles)

To me the only thing CE3 needs to do over CE2 is :

1. The ability to have AF and POM enabled at the same time, that alone would make Crysis and other CE based games looks loads better IMO. Fran is this available in CE3?

2. Better AA for the trees, grass...etc..etc..etc...

Anything else to me is a bonus :D
 
I'm toying now with EdgeAA and in my opinion it looks very promising both in terms of speed and quality. We'll see how it goes.

Ooh, is this the same/similar to the Edge AA modes available on ATI hardware for PCs?

And thank you, thank you, thank you, for continuing to investigate AA. :) I love (in a platonic way mind you) all devs that continue to implement and look at ways to implement AA. :)

Regards,
SB
 
So from what i understand its...

CE3 (PC) >> CE2 (PC) >> CE3 (Consoles)

To me the only thing CE3 needs to do over CE2 is :

1. The ability to have AF and POM enabled at the same time, that alone would make Crysis and other CE based games looks loads better IMO. Fran is this available in CE3?

2. Better AA for the trees, grass...etc..etc..etc...

Anything else to me is a bonus :D

I'd say CE3 (Console) > CE2 (PC) for some things.

Lack of resolution and processing power however may dictate that you cannot simultaneously enable ALL features.

But I'm pretty sure the engine itself is capable of more than the CE2 engine on PC.

Regards,
SB
 
I'd say CE3 (Console) > CE2 (PC) for some things.

Lack of resolution and processing power however may dictate that you cannot simultaneously enable ALL features.

But I'm pretty sure the engine itself is capable of more than the CE2 engine on PC.

Regards,
SB

From what ive seen of the console footage it seems as if there are nowere near CE2, bear in mind it is running on, in essence, 7800GTX hardware in regards to PS3. I had an 7900GTX and that crapped itself playing Crysis, obv consoles are a closed box and are running a more streamlined console friendly engine but they will never match even CE2, maybe come close to it in some respects but thats about it :D

Draw distance has took a major hit, textures have and most of the PP effects have, for the hardware the consoles have it is impressive but i can show you stuff CE2 is doing on PC that you would not beleive and is way beyond console abilities.
 
Good call on the quote :)
I remember I wrote in the past that Tiling on 360 is a solved problem, in the sense that a pretty optimal solution to implementing it exists.
I'm not sure anymore that Tiling is the "right" solution to the AA problem on 360. And I would also extend this to MSAA in general. It feels somehow wrong having to spend so much memory to store fragments and then use it effectively only for edges. Memory spent for MSAA on 360 translates directly to the processing cost involved in Tiling.
If I take this memory/speed hit, I want FSAA and much better quality over all.

I'm toying now with EdgeAA and in my opinion it looks very promising both in terms of speed and quality. We'll see how it goes.

Is edge AA what UE3 games like Gears 2 use?

Cause if it is, I don't mind, it seems to get the job done quite effectively (especially if its coupled with DoF).

How do the costs of using edge AA compare to a two tile 720p 2xMSAA solution?
And any reason AAA titles like Halo 3 don't use it?
 
^ Halo 3 had a dual(?) HDR set up and couldn't really afford to apply AA. They already had to shrink the resolution size to 680p to squeeze in their lighting system.

The engine itself was more than capable of performing AA...
 
^ Halo 3 had a dual(?) HDR set up and couldn't really afford to apply AA. They already had to shrink the resolution size to 680p to squeeze in their lighting system.

The engine itself was more than capable of performing AA...

I know that their HDR setup precluded them from using MSAA (without tiling), but why couldn't they use non-traditional antialiasing techniques such as edge or temporal AA, instead?
 
Is edge AA what UE3 games like Gears 2 use?

I thought Gears 2 used 2xMSAA on static objects?

In regards to the edgeAA I think he's talking about CEs edgeAA CVAR (which is a form of 'fake' AA that applies to vegetation and object edges). I think it's very effective at hiding the aliasing that the vegetation (plants, leaves, etc...) in Crysis exhibits (edgeAA with a value of 2 in particularly). In fact, if I could play Crysis with MSAA I'd still choose the edgeAA instead as normal MSAA doesn't apply to the vegetation (which looks horrible without it).

In my opinion, unless CE3 can work in transparency MSAA, I'd just rather them stick to the edgeAA (it's faster than 2xMSAA and I'm pretty sure you can't use both together).
 
I thought Gears 2 used 2xMSAA on static objects?

In regards to the edgeAA I think he's talking about CEs edgeAA CVAR (which is a form of 'fake' AA that applies to vegetation and object edges). I think it's very effective at hiding the aliasing that the vegetation (plants, leaves, etc...) in Crysis exhibits (edgeAA with a value of 2 in particularly). In fact, if I could play Crysis with MSAA I'd still choose the edgeAA instead as normal MSAA doesn't apply to the vegetation (which looks horrible without it).

In my opinion, unless CE3 can work in transparency MSAA, I'd just rather them stick to the edgeAA (it's faster than 2xMSAA and I'm pretty sure you can't use both together).

But doesn't UE3 not support tiling? If so it couldn't do MSAA when running at 720p on 360? (due to the framebuffer not fitting into the Edram). And if it does support tiling, why not let everything get the AA? (as it's essentially 'free', apart from the geometry cost of tiling).

I thought Gears used edge AA (or edge blurring) on objects in the foreground and let depth of field hid jaggies further out.
 
But doesn't UE3 not support tiling? If so it couldn't do MSAA when running at 720p on 360? (due to the framebuffer not fitting into the Edram). And if it does support tiling, why not let everything get the AA? (as it's essentially 'free', apart from the geometry cost of tiling).

I thought Gears used edge AA (or edge blurring) on objects in the foreground and let depth of field hid jaggies further out.

Without going too off topic, here's some more info on that:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1258495&postcount=308

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1258508&postcount=310

No, there are surfaces that are without the depth of field effect that exhibit classic MSAA.
 
From what ive seen of the console footage it seems as if there are nowere near CE2, bear in mind it is running on, in essence, 7800GTX hardware in regards to PS3. I had an 7900GTX and that crapped itself playing Crysis, obv consoles are a closed box and are running a more streamlined console friendly engine but they will never match even CE2, maybe come close to it in some respects but thats about it :D

Draw distance has took a major hit, textures have and most of the PP effects have, for the hardware the consoles have it is impressive but i can show you stuff CE2 is doing on PC that you would not beleive and is way beyond console abilities.

I think what he is saying there is that the engine itself is superior (CE3 > CE2) but the implementation of CE3 on consoles, given the limited hardware resources will still result in inferior graphics to CE2 on the PC.

Or in other words, if they tried to use CE2 on the consoles to render the same level of quality that we saw in the earlier video, the framerate would have been much worse.

I'm dubious as to the level of improvement we would see on the PC if Crysis had been implemented on CE3 rather than CE2. My suspicion is that the big improvements being made to the CE are mostly to do with squeezing it into the limited resources of a console without completely murdering the graphics. Sounds like there are some improvements on the PC side as well but i'm betting they are mostly feature additions rather than making the whole engine much faster while maintaining the same level of image quality.
 
From what we know thus far, it seems CE3 is a re-architectured engine to be more platform-agnostic. Probably with a couple of new features thrown in for the PC version (for now). End-user-wise, as many have mentioned before, there's nothing in this video that surpasses what we've seen Crysis/CWarhead.
 
From what we know thus far, it seems CE3 is a re-architectured engine to be more platform-agnostic. Probably with a couple of new features thrown in for the PC version (for now). End-user-wise, as many have mentioned before, there's nothing in this video that surpasses what we've seen Crysis/CWarhead.

Still, even if there are not many new features for the PC version (although Crytek says they have made some important additions there too), from a multi-platform middleware provider point of view CE2 was a relative flop while CE3 can finally deliver the goods and be competitive against the other middleware makers (they now have something that can also target the current HD consoles).
 
I wanna know what new features that are currently implemented in the CE3 console version against CE2, also what features that are PC exclusive on the CE3. For all we know there could be some UBER lighting effects only available for the likes of Larrabee or future gen consoles hidden in CE3.
There's also one thing never explained by Crytek, they said some features were hidden in CE2 and only to be unveiled with the proper hardware, yet they've never shown any so far. So instead they probably recompiled all that into CE3. Or am I running circles here?
 
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