Hardware

[icycalm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u85sf_ARiW0

Only marginally better than 2, as far as I can tell. And the abundant tearing sort of makes the video pointless and robs it of whatever little impact it might have had.

But at least it's good the Unreal engine is getting some competition.

[Molloy]

From what I've read on message boards (never the most reliable source), the reason it isn't that dramatically better looking than CryEngine 2 is because it's designed to run on consoles too. Crysis sold very badly as a result of needing bleeding-edge PC hardware, so the new version is designed to scale a bit better.

[icycalm]

Yeah, that would explain it. There was a huge jump between 1 and 2, so I was very disappointed, and baffled, by this. I guess Xboxification also affects engine complexity as well as other aspects of game design.

[El Chaos]

Besides the intention of making their game releases more commercially viable, I think this third version would be a "Seven" to the second version's "Vista". Here's an example to illustrate my point.

A local magazine published an article about the engine's (that is, Crysis') performance on various PC setups. The most radical and informative of those have to do with the then highest-end system they could come up with (back in October of last year; the game's version was 1.21 and they used 32-bit Windows Vista, which also means they used DirectX 10), which consisted of a Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM at 1333 MHz, a GeForce GTX 280 with 1 GB of GDDR3 VRAM (with version 177.39 of ForceWare), and even two 500 GB WD HDDs with 16 MB of cache configured in RAID 0. Fraps threw results of miserable 19.3 frames per second when configured at 1680×1050 with 4×AA, 8×AF and all settings at very high detail. With the same settings, it reached 25.7 fps at 1280×1024, barely above standard HD.

Although it looked absolutely stunning, the game was poorly coded and didn't make an efficient use of SLI/CrossFire setups.

[Beakman]

Hello to everyone on this forum.

I'd like to see an HD version of that video. As icycalm stated, it only looks marginally better, but the low definition doesn't help to discern the differences, if any.

CryEngine 2 itself went through various iterations in retail products. The one that came with Crysis lost roughly 10 fps if it ran on Vista instead of on XP with the "DX10" effects unlocked (which could be done by editing some .ini file or something, although a couple of shaders still looked a bit different under DX10, there was no noticeable upgrade in quality under DX10 after the modification). I have a 8800 GTX, 2 GB DDR2 RAM at 800 MHz and a Core 2 Duo E6400 overclocked to 3.2 GHz. It ran at around 25 fps, but I had to lower the resolution to 1280x720. I tried to run it at 1920x1080 and it was not playable at all. And that was without AF or AA in both cases.

In Crysis' expansion, Warhead, CryEngine 2 was a lot more optimized. I haven't tried it on my TV, but on a 1280x1024 monitor it runs much better, around 40 or 50 fps with exactly the same setup of course, and now it doesn't need modification in any file to show every effect under XP. Some textures are also a little bit more detailed than in Crysis and my system is nowhere near as powerful as the one ChaosAngelZero mentioned. Still, according to hardware review sites, it doesn't scale well with multiple video card setups.

Those guys at Crytek know their optimization. I imagine that CryEngine 3 is more of a port of the second version than a full-blown engine but, if it runs well on a 360 or PS3, a decent PC now should run circles round it. Still, it'll be worth to check out what other features have been added (an easier to use SDK, new physics shit or something?)

I hope too that this one gets a decent slice of the game engine market. Unreal engine has been monopolizing third-party engines and the only games running on UE3 that don't look/run like shit are the ones from Epic themselves.

[Worm]

Here's one new feature in CryEngine 3:

Global Illumination with Light Propagation Volumes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqeXuO2AlEE&fmt=22

Skip to 1:10 to see indirect illumination and color "bleed" from lit surfaces. It's definitely a step up in terms of real-time lighting, and I'll be very interested to see how well this works on the consoles.

You can download a better-quality AVI from Crytek's site, as well as a technical overview: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/presentations

[El Chaos]

A new performance trailer, this time showing PS3 and 360 footage:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... blog-entry

[icycalm]

CryEngine 2 versus CryEngine 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJG14uLA3k&fmt=22

[Beakman]

That video should be called "Crysis on consoles versus Crysis on PC". Plus, the 360 doesn't have dedicated video memory (it has 512 MB of system memory, which is shared between the CPU and GPU). Still, it's a long shot from the amount of RAM available on a PC that would run the first Crysis well.

I hope Crytek doesn't give the PC the finger by porting over the engine weaknesses shown in that video to the PC version of the game (like pretty much every other first-person shooter developer nowadays).

The optimization done to the engine for consoles is impressive, though, considering how slow Crysis ran on practically any PC hardware when it shipped (at "very high" settings). Back then, the game needed much more powerful hardware than the PS3 or 360 to even look like the console versions on that video.

[another Riposte]

We got a sexy new video from GDC 2010:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-10-crysis-2/63009

[Worm]

Here are some old videos that only recently came to my attention.

This one is poor quality, but has real-time walkthroughs of the areas from the '09 CryEngine 3 teaser (not the Crysis 2 trailer) with developer commentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbwZwQeGvD8&fmt=22

I did notice some pop-in of small objects; hopefully the PC version will allow higher level-of-detail.

These next videos show feedback from the 360 version based on changes being made in the PC editor. The environment is a bland interior space, but you can see some of the improved effects.

PC/console parallel setup and time-of-day settings:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-1 ... ne-3/63102

Lighting:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-1 ... ne-3/63100

Blended shader layers and wet surfaces:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-1 ... ne-3/63098

Destructible and deformable objects:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-1 ... ne-3/63096

Event scripting:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-1 ... ne-3/63094

Deferred lighting seems to be the biggest improvement over CryEngine 2 — in Crysis the number of light sources in any given scene is small. The new deformation/destruction effects don't look very realistic, but I do like that Crytek is trying to make an engine that "does it all" without middleware, with most of the effects in real-time and not precalculated.

[icycalm]

There's a dedicated site now, by the way:

http://mycryengine.com/

[icycalm]

They should make a version of the engine for fagots. CryFagotsEngine 3. I think it'd be a hit with the indie scene.

[Worm]

Feature showcase for the latest CryEngine 3 SDK update:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwk2Zi0c3o


New physics demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppTmsNFneg

Supposedly this will be integrated with CryEngine 3, but I don't see an official confirmation anywhere.

EDIT: The guys who made this, BeamNG, seem to have no affiliation with Crytek. The CryEngine 3 SDK is free, so anyone can download it and use it.

We can port it to any engine pretty easily. We already support breaking apart of parts and meshes to some extent - we're still developing that. The collision is also a work in progress, and will be much better in the future.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ow/c4tg3er

[Worm]

New effects trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0ffBZI5PpM&hd=1