Holy Crap... CryENGINE 3 Crysis 3 Tech Trailer

[zamardii]

Time for some upgrades?

http://youtu.be/Y0ffBZI5PpM

Looks like they got the Battlefield 3 lens flare down. lol

Instant Buy! "Top Secret Tessellated Toad Tech."

Anyone want to take a guess as to minimum and recommended specs?

 

[TheBuzzer]

is crysis 3 pc exclusive? if not some old gfx card might still run it.

it just shows how poorly written the first crysis engine was.

 

[dremic]

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1710314

theres a thread here already

 

[zamardii]

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1710314

theres a thread here already

Just noticed that. Didn't even bother looking under the PC section since it comes out for all platforms. My mistake.

 

[Flogger23m]

is crysis 3 pc exclusive? if not some old gfx card might still run it.

it just shows how poorly written the first crysis engine was.

The maps were larger and there were a lot more trees. Just about any game with large amounts of vegetation run poorly. Take ArmA II for example. Forest maps run terrible at 25-30 frame rates for me, yet a map with little vegetation can get up to 60. I bet the same applies to Crysis 1 to 2.

 

[JoeUser]

is crysis 3 pc exclusive? if not some old gfx card might still run it.

it just shows how poorly written the first crysis engine was.

I really wish people would quit complaining about Crysis like they know what the hell it takes to make a optimized gaming engine...

I think most here would agree that its not the engine...its the GRAPHICS! I mean, anyone with half a brain will know that its not bad optimizing that make Crysis run like it does, its the mass amount of shit on the screen that hurts performance.

With my sig build I run Crysis smooth as butter maxed the fuck out WITH hi-res textures and improved lighting/shading mods...among many others.

TheBuzzer! I've got a CHALLENGE FOR YOU! You show me ONE game that looks as nice as Crysis and has the same level of technology in use that runs smooth as butter on a PC that can't comfortably run Crysis.

I'll be waiting for your response.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

I see marketing speak like this:

Now, with DirectX 11 support, real-time rendering has gotten even better, allowing for some of the best visuals ever seen.

But nothing confirming the trailer was rendered in real time, rather than rendered at 1 frame per minute and played back later. I want to believe...

 

[socK]

Just noticed that. Didn't even bother looking under the PC section since it comes out for all platforms. My mistake.

I chose the PC section because it was seemingly a PC version showcase.

I really wish people would quit complaining about Crysis like they know what the hell it takes to make a optimized gaming engine...

I think most here would agree that its not the engine...its the GRAPHICS! I mean, anyone with half a brain will know that its not bad optimizing that make Crysis run like it does, its the mass amount of shit on the screen that hurts performance.

With my sig build I run Crysis smooth as butter maxed the fuck out WITH hi-res textures and improved lighting/shading mods...among many others.

TheBuzzer! I've got a CHALLENGE FOR YOU! You show me ONE game that looks as nice as Crysis and has the same level of technology in use that runs smooth as butter on a PC that can't comfortably run Crysis.

I'll be waiting for your response.

I've literally seen one of their employees say that they'd consider CE2 unoptimized compared to CE3. They didn't make the engineering effort for no reason. Maybe modern PC hardware devours it, but their mindset was apparently for the most part to go hog wild, they have much stricter guidelines on performance now. They wanted the engine to scale better, that's why there was a shift to deferred rendering, a bigger emphasis put on better multi-threading, and a bunch of other shit.

That scene with the sparks lighting shit up near the generator would probably be impossible in CE2 or seriously damage performance. There was a hard cap of 32 lights and it would probably very, very quickly make that scene hilariously expensive to render.

Ultimately it's a likely combination of more careful artwork / level design and engine changes rather than being strictly one.

I see marketing speak like this:


But nothing confirming the trailer was rendered in real time, rather than rendered at 1 frame per minute and played back later. I want to believe...

Pretty sure I saw an employee on their forums mention it was captured from a PC and that they're looking at a 60 fps video for next time as well. Real time is kind of Crytek's thing, they no doubt want to flex nuts about that as hard as possible.

 

[IIvII]

I was about to say this was a step in the right direction but nothing significantly ground-breaking until I saw the top secret tessellated toad tech. Wowsers.

 

[Litfod]

I've literally seen one of their employees say that they'd consider CE2 unoptimized compared to CE3.

Great, so let's see an apples-to-apples comparison of CE3 rendering as much stuff as some of the heavier Crysis environments, and doing it faster and/or with better image quality. Because optimising the environments to suit the engine, like they seemed to do with Crysis 2, isn't the same thing. Warhead was supposed to be optimised compared with original Crysis, but they made it look noticeably worse in the process.

I mean of course they'll have made improvements in the 5 years since Crysis was released. Of course they'll look back on some of the stuff now and think "what the fuck were we thinking?". But that old "Crysis was poorly optimized" line is just asinine and was common amongst people who couldn't stand the fact that it raped their mid-range PCs. It was ahead of everything else by light years when it was released, and it still holds up well against everyone else's work today.

 

[socK]

Great, so let's see an apples-to-apples comparison of CE3 rendering as much stuff as some of the heavier Crysis environments, and doing it faster and/or with better image quality.

I don't even know why you're arguing it, Crytek has put out papers that you can just go download off their site going over shit they've overhauled and changed in their quest. Was CE2 some comically awful, shitty experience? No, but CE3 is faster, there's no denying it. It's more flexible, it scales better, and it looks better doing it.

Here's the post I mentioned.
http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?p=845991

 

[termite]

I'm pretty sure that CE3 is being used for MW:O.

 

[P4rD0nM3]

I fully agree with Lit, obviously there were some things that they could have improve back then. But still, during that time Crysis just raped your PC if you have a mid-range PC. Hell even high-end PCs were having a hard time.

 

[mope54]

oh geez citing a crytek post on how unoptimized ce1 was compared to ce3

I don't believe any of the shit they try and spew and now we're supposed to believe that ce1 was a big sloppy mess and ce3 is 100x better? I always cringed when people claimed how unoptimized crysis was but that's a separate issue from me refusing to believe that ce3 is going to be some substantial and amazing difference.


if you believe that ce1 was a big sloppy mess then there's no reason to believe crytek that ce3 won't be more of the same.
I loathe the way we were treated after having defended crytek for a couple years actually only to be spit in the face

 

[MrCrispy]

Its a really good looking demo but for some reason it didn't have the wow factor that the BF3 trailer had. And I'm talking just about the graphics, not gameplay. Maybe its got to do with vegetation, which is what Crytek is all about. Even with all the work they've put in, its far from looking real and is easy to spot. Compare that with motion capture for likelike movement and animations of humans, and that suddenly looks more realistic. Also the tank demo in BF3 had gorgeous outdoors.

 

[naticus]

5 years later Crysis 1 is still one of the nicest games on the market. I don't believe it was engine optimization issue, more like an engine that was ahead of it's time.

 

[socK]

oh geez citing a crytek post on how unoptimized ce1 was compared to ce3

I don't believe any of the shit they try and spew and now we're supposed to believe that ce1 was a big sloppy mess and ce3 is 100x better? I always cringed when people claimed how unoptimized crysis was but that's a separate issue from me refusing to believe that ce3 is going to be some substantial and amazing difference.


if you believe that ce1 was a big sloppy mess then there's no reason to believe crytek that ce3 won't be more of the same.
I loathe the way we were treated after having defended crytek for a couple years actually only to be spit in the face

Somehow I trust that a graphics programmer at Crytek knows a little about the internals / details than Hardforums user mope54. CE3 was a superset / improvement of CE2. An enormous generational leap like CE1 -> CE2? I don't think so, but there's still improvements to be found all over. He even goes over some things, talking about how they merged a lot of post processing effects so it's done in a single pass rather than multiple, etc. It's a better engine, what part of this is wrong?

Here's a video I recorded. Scenes like this in Crysis 2 were doing 60+ fps on my GTX 260. The performance / prettiness ratio was crazy, the whole game ran smooth as fuck. The graphics setting debacle was hilariously stupid, but seriously, the game was absolute butter compared to the first one, which I've beaten multiple times on the highest settings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-pSVA_7ewg

 

[mope54]

pleeeease explain to us ignorant fools what a *shader* dev knows about the game's engine code (which is what most people think they're whining about when they harp on how unoptimized crysis was)

incidentally, the quotes you cite here are him talking about how much work has been done on the shader and texture side of things...and him later stating he should get his earlier work out to demonstrate just how powerful ce1 is. I mean, if you read that far in the thread that you apparently found by googleing "crysis unoptimized"

and food for thought...there was a time when Cry-Styves was simply "Styves" doing his shader mods and a measly lil ole forum member just like yours truly back in the day (seems doubtful you were around). well I was in the scene then and he hasn't changed his tune much from before he was a crytek employee. his "insight" certainly wasn't gleaned from his position.

 

[wonderfield]

Considering that you can't draw a single pixel without a shader in modern graphics APIs, the guy writing just shaders (if there is such a person) knows quite a bit about the rendering pipeline, assuming that person touches most of he game's shaders.

Shader optimization is very much at the heart of rendering performance.

 

[XvMMvX]

Absolutely stunning... I can't believe what they can do now days.

 

[socK]

pleeeease explain to us ignorant fools what a *shader* dev knows about the game's engine code (which is what most people think they're whining about when they harp on how unoptimized crysis was)

EVERYTHING is drawn with shaders in modern API's, the fixed function stuff is gone -- you can't even draw a single triangle without a shader. On modern hardware, even the fixed function equivalents of olde are internally emulated by the driver as shaders. You can likely trust that he has a pretty solid understanding of the underlying process.

 

[mope54]

like I wrote earlier, anyone who reads the thread instead of the cherry picked line socK is trying to use for evidence, Styves is clearly making a distinction between the shader optimizations he wrote (for his mods earlier and ce3 later) and the rest of the engine--which in his *personal* opinion was not well optimized.

his opinion is also that everyone at crytek knows this even if they're unwilling to admit it

in any case, when people whine about crysis being unoptimized they are not simply referring to the rendering engine and no the game's engine is *not* simply the rendering engine

this whole notion that shader optimizations are solely (or even mainly) responsible for a game's performance is anachronistic when it comes to crysis 1.


and just to be clear: none of what you guys are trying to argue about here gives any indication that the optimizations he claims to have addressed means the game is now fixed, or what it's optimized for (his comments are specifically aimed at running cryengine on the console), or even anything related to this discussion seeing as his comments were from over a year ago...but the claim that this will be the best, smoothest, and most wonderful gaming experience is what they say every single time they're about to release a crysis game and there's a lot of us who supported them from the beginning who were shat upon for continuing to eat that shit up and that's *my* main point

 

[socK]

Yea, stuff like overhauled multi-threading, streaming, resource management, physics, toolchain, and a billion other things that changed to get it working on the consoles don't actually exist. It's just a dreamt up figment of imagination. None of the changes were actually necessarily and they wasted all that dev time just to make things worse / exactly the same.

Anyway, tetxures, objects, LODs, all of these things were not well optimized for memory usage in CE2. With some correct optimizations they could easily get the game to run within the console
limits. Again, the game was actually horribly optimized, and everyone at Crytek knows it. Everything from the assets to the post-process pipeline wasn't given much thought as they were purely PC at the time. The move to consoles really opened their eyes to it. And now CE3 runs as smooth as butter.

He provides several examples of other things, right there, that they looked at to help get it playable on consoles. Those things are part of the engine. Art work, tool chain, rendering code, etc.

There are papers and talks from Crytek, posts by employees, I'VE played and beaten both games to see the difference. It was no Far Cry to Crysis leap, but Crysis 2 was still more or less among the best looking games out with ease, AND it ran absurdly well on my machine to top it off.

 

[mope54]

Yea, stuff like overhauled multi-threading, streaming, resource management, physics, toolchain, and a billion other things that changed to get it working on the consoles don't actually exist. It's just a dreamt up figment of imagination. None of the changes were actually necessarily and they wasted all that dev time just to make things worse / exactly the same.



He provides several examples of other things, right there, that they looked at to help get it playable on consoles. Those things are part of the engine. Art work, tool chain, rendering code, etc.

There are papers and talks from Crytek, posts by employees, I'VE played and beaten both games to see the difference. It was no Far Cry to Crysis leap, but Crysis 2 was still more or less among the best looking games out with ease, AND it ran absurdly well on my machine to top it off.

ok, in your post here you are listing a bunch of optimizations for the console.

This side-discussion started because someone remarked that if this is a PC exclusive title it'll demonstrate how poorly written the first game was.

Me and other people were disagreeing with that and I don't think what your'e posting here supports that opinion and it doesn't refute what we are saying. I don't understand why you think all these optimizations for a different platform are relevant to whether a 5 year old PC exclusive title was or was not coded properly.

Do you think that those optimizations for the consoles have relevance to how a game would run on the PC?


If he's talking about all the optimizations he had to do to get the rendering engine in CE3 operable on consoles, negative comments regarding consoles being akin to racism, and how the PC version developers didn't do a good job because the platform didn't force them to then he sounds like he has a strong opinion biased toward consoles and doesn't think much of the PC developers. So his personal opinion about how good of a job they did isn't convincing to me.


Lastly, whether the game ran well enough for some people was not and is not the problem with the Crysis franchise. The problems with the Crysis franchise are that we got sold a rolled up patch based on our input, lied to about the franchise remaining PC exclusive, continuously accused of crippling the company with piracy, and finally selling us a stale shooter on rails.

I don't think optimizing the code for consoles is going to change much of that nor does it get me particularly excited.

 

[Droc]

Wasnt really fallowing the discussion, but I always have a softspot for Crisis.
IMHO, the gaming world is going to the tits. Everyone reusing old engines for consoles, pumping out the same games with a different number of the box...
Crisis is one of the few games thats a benchmark game. Half the people who purchased Crysis did so to see if they could run it.

If we want to see better hardware and better software, you need games like crysis to push the hardware limits so companies like AMD and Nvidia have to push to bring us better hardware...aswell as other games have to push that extra bit to make things look that little bit better.

 

[Brules]

F me that is amazing........I think my 560 Ti just shit itself in fear........

 

[AgentxofxChaos]

Looks awesome! Can definitely visualize a huge amount of possibilities in level/environment design using that engine/tech.

 

[Tudz]

Is it just me or do Crytek just keep making really fucking awesome engines but no one actually uses them?

I remember seeing the CryEngine 1 videos thinking "Wow! I'd love to see some games made on this!" and then CryEngine 2 was like "Wow! Not an amazing graphical leap, but if it lets developers develop on all 3 platforms that easily, I can't wait to see some games made on it!" and now again we have another tech demo of a Crytek engine... is anyone actually gonna use these damned engines for anything beyond the few mediocre games that Crytek themselves put out every now and then???

 

[socK]

ok, in your post here you are listing a bunch of optimizations for the console.

Ahah you're seriously hopeless. Yeah PC could never benefit from any of that stuff.

Over in PC land we have no use for garbage like threaded particle systems, rendering, occlusion culling, and physics among other things to better use our systems with more cores. And what about that other nonsense like deferred lighting... after all, what use could several hundred lights on screen with good performance ever be compared to the probably on average single digits of Crysis 1? Clever new real time GI system? Dumb. Faster ambient occlusion that looks better at the same time? Stupid console optimization. Gamma correct / physically correct lighting? Another retarded console gimmick that provides no benefit whatsoever to PC. Streaming to help cut down load times / memory usage and pave the way for even bigger levels? We don't need that horse shit.

Do you realize how dumb the point you're trying to make is? All of that is progress and advances. Why would I not want a gigantic GTA-esque city to be possible with Cryengine because of better streaming? Or a creepy sci-fi scene where individual sparks each cast their own light, or a night club or something with lights strobing and casting all over the place. Or easier to design levels where it takes less manual work from the artists to get shit running quickly so they can focus on making it pretty.

tldr; what

Is it just me or do Crytek just keep making really fucking awesome engines but no one actually uses them?

I remember seeing the CryEngine 1 videos thinking "Wow! I'd love to see some games made on this!" and then CryEngine 2 was like "Wow! Not an amazing graphical leap, but if it lets developers develop on all 3 platforms that easily, I can't wait to see some games made on it!" and now again we have another tech demo of a Crytek engine... is anyone actually gonna use these damned engines for anything beyond the few mediocre games that Crytek themselves put out every now and then???

Lucky for you, they thought the same thing, which is exactly one of the reasons as to why they were making a large push and trying to get licenses. There's a few games that have / are going to use it so far. I'm guess they'll really try and flex nuts with it once next gen consoles hit, as that'll be their big chance to cut into the Unreal engine dominance.

 

[mope54]

instead of insulting me you might be better off doing some more research
the more stubbornly you cling to what you think you know the less likely you are to learn something that you don't know


first of all, I never said the PC platform doesn't have a need for rendering or physics or threaded particle systems

what I did say, and you haven't been able to contradict yet, is that coding those systems for a particular console platform has little to no relevance to how those systems are coded for a specific PC platform.

and as for that "nonsense like deferred lighting" I used a word earlier in the thread that I apparently should have defined for you. Anachronistic means that you're mixing up the chronological order of something. In this case, you're arguing that the lighting techniques in a game released in 2007 (and the engine was surely in development earlier than 2007) was unoptimized due to it not implementing a technology that didn't become mainstream in video games until 2008-2010.

Not only that, but it's not a clear-cut conclusion that deferred lighting is the best or even most realistic way to do lighting. There are trade-offs. Here is an article on deferred lighting vs. forward rendering:
http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/...ring-whywhen-forward-rendering-still-matters/

I haven't played COD but for those who have see if this conclusion of his does not ring true...it's reminiscent of the comparison between Crysis and Crysis 2:

Let’s finish this article talking about two games: COD: MW2, which uses a forward render, and COD: Black Ops, which according to the developers uses a deferred render (I’m not comparing Infinity Ward with Treyarch here). In that case, according to many reviewers, the first one presented more photo-realistic graphics than the second one. And if you played Black Ops you probably noticed that the way dynamic lights lit geometries is very limited, so what’s the point in using deferred rendering?

Considering all those items I would say that depending on the game a forward render might still be the best way to go in the current generation.

and here is a discussion of people comparing the benefits and negatives of deferred lighting as it was starting to become news in the gaming realm (~2006):
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/416221-crysis-using-deferred-shading-/


socK might try to quote a single sentence from my post again. That seems to be his MO in order to try and make a point. That's what he did with the crytek dev and that's what he did with my earlier posts. But looking at the discussion with all of the points made rather than his cherry-picked selections gives a far more broader picture that it's not cut and dry that deferred rendering is the best way to do things for PC development. A developer having to optimize portions of a game engine so it would even run on a console doesn't make the earlier engine poorly coded. And finally, it's a poor argument to claim that technologies arising after a game engine was developed make the earlier work sloppy or poorly coded.

 

[LordofWar]

Wow, it looks really awesome.

 

[socK]

first of all, I never said the PC platform doesn't have a need for rendering or physics or threaded particle systems

what I did say, and you haven't been able to contradict yet, is that coding those systems for a particular console platform has little to no relevance to how those systems are coded for a specific PC platform.

I say:

Yea, stuff like overhauled multi-threading, streaming, resource management, physics, toolchain, and a billion other things that changed to get it working on the consoles don't actually exist. It's just a dreamt up figment of imagination. None of the changes were actually necessarily and they wasted all that dev time just to make things worse / exactly the same.

You say:

ok, in your post here you are listing a bunch of optimizations for the console.

Ok, so what does this mean then? What is the point of even saying that? I'm saying the platform doesn't matter, it's general improvement that benefits all parties. Cool, congrats, they used and applied things they learned while working on shit hardware -- and everyone wins, why would it not be applicable?

and as for that "nonsense like deferred lighting" I used a word earlier in the thread that I apparently should have defined for you. Anachronistic means that you're mixing up the chronological order of something. In this case, you're arguing that the lighting techniques in a game released in 2007 (and the engine was surely in development earlier than 2007) was unoptimized due to it not implementing a technology that didn't become mainstream in video games until 2008-2010.

They didn't use it at the time because it was too new, they decided it wouldn't be massively beneficial to them given the mostly outdoor nature of the game. They mention it in one of the papers: "... For the alien indoor environment that would probably be the best solution but other environments would suffer from that decision. In a one light source situation deferred shading simply cannot play out its advantages." The point of deferred lighting isn't to look different, it's to decouple the lighting from geometry, so you're not eating a billion passes and rerendering things a ton of times because you have a couple lights hitting 8 pixels of an object.

They didn't just find out about it and go OH FUCK right before shipping the first game and knowing they missed the deffered train. It wasn't even news, it shipped on an Xbox 1 title (and a 360 launch title) and has existed for YEARS before that. And it's only become more enticing now with further advances. They want a more flexible engine. It's potentially bad news when you're pushing millions of triangles in scene cost already and that can potentially blow up even worse from the lighting. Again they want more flexibility, why do you think so many engines are moving to / using it? Naive forward renderering doesn't scale well for the future, which is exactly why they opted for a deferred solution.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Looking pretty good for sure.

We'll probably need a 4P system to play it on the lowest settings though.

 

[mope54]

Ok, so what does this mean then? What is the point of even saying that? I'm saying the platform doesn't matter, it's general improvement that benefits all parties. Cool, congrats, they used and applied things they learned while working on shit hardware -- and everyone wins, why would it not be applicable?

The platform does matter because game design and code are not platform agnostic.

When you quote a developer discussing how he had to rework a game engine for a console release because the original developers never considered the limitations of consoles as evidence that the PC version wasn't optimized for the platform it was designed for you're taking his comments out of context.

You're contradicting yourself on the forward rendering vs. deferred rendering point:

they decided it wouldn't be massively beneficial to them given the mostly outdoor nature of the game.

Naive forward renderering doesn't scale well for the future, which is exactly why they opted for a deferred solution.

 

[wonderfield]

Much game engine code is indeed platform-agnostic. I don't know how a person could reasonably argue otherwise, unless that person has absolutely no game engne programming experience whatsoever.

 

[socK]

The platform does matter because game design and code are not platform agnostic.

When you quote a developer discussing how he had to rework a game engine for a console release because the original developers never considered the limitations of consoles as evidence that the PC version wasn't optimized for the platform it was designed for you're taking his comments out of context.

You're contradicting yourself on the forward rendering vs. deferred rendering point:

Why would they not be platform agnostic? Have you ever seen an id game? I've played Quake on my phone, Doom 3 already has a source port for Android that makes it in game, Doom runs on calculators. Quake 3 ran game code in its own virtual machine (which did neat things like let you sandbox mod code so you didn't crash the entire game when game code went awry) and had an interpreter too.

Why do you think stuff like SDL exists? How do you think it works behind the scenes? As much of the code as possible is portable, it's all abstracted out and hidden away beneath the API they build, and from there it's just filling in implementation details.


And is it that hard to decipher that I meant "at the time" with the first line? Straight from here:
http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/presentations&page=3
Finding Next Gen CryENGINE™ 2

Then a later CE3 presentation:
A bit more deferred – CryEngine3

Crysis ships -> holy fuck what do we want to improve in our engine

PS3 / XBox360
GPU, CPU, memory
Improve streaming
Improve multithreading
Improve lighting
More predictable performance
Tackle the shader combination issue

 

[mope54]

socK,

according to your own citation, Crytek implemented forward rendering because they felt it was the best method for their design choices: namely a large-scale, outside, jungle environment

they switched to deferred rendering in crysis 2, not because forward rendering is "naive" as you claim, but because of the reasons listed in your own citation: "For the alien indoor environment that would probably be the best solution"

deferred rendering is not the only or even the best method of doing things. I've posted a number of links of game developers discussing the benefits and short-comings of either method. You've posted statements directly from Crytek supporting my analysis: the rendering method and game design are linked


consoles have particular restrictions that PC's don't have. optimizing for a console port does not necessarily mean that the PC version is unoptimized. You still haven't explained how you make that leap of logic. Even the developer's comments you are citing don't make that claim. The best one can say is that CryEngine 2 is not optimized for consoles. In fact, that's what he says. It was never intended to be used for games on any console.


You then try and take the fact that subsequent games in the Crysis franchise run much better than the first Crysis game--even on the PC--as evidence that the PC version was unoptimized.

The problem with that position is that the subsequent games don't do as much with outdoor environments as the first game. If you tried to do Crysis 1 in CryEngine 3 who knows whether it would perform better or worse. You're making an assumption that the engine more optimized for the indoor, urban maps of Crysis 2 and, according to the developers' statements you quoted, specifically to address console limitations, would perform better than CryEngine 2.

That assumption of yours is contradicted by Crytek developers stating deferred lighting would not have given them optimal results for Crysis.



Finally, let's get back to the original claim. It may be fun for you to hammer pedantic point after pedantic point but the truth of the matter is that nothing you have quoted is evidence that the original game engine is unoptimized. The original claim that releasing Crysis 3 on the PC and experiencing buttery smooth playing even on mid-range computers would be evidence that the original engine was unoptimized is false.

The only way to demonstrate what you are claiming is true, or that CE3 is a better optimized engine for Crysis 1 than CE2 is to demonstrate Crysis 1 running within CE3.

Since you and wonderfield are game developers or know so much about it, I suggest you get to that task. In fact, the developer you cited claimed in that thread he would welcome such a project. He might even help you if you PM'ed him.

 

[Plague_Injected]

Is it just me or do Crytek just keep making really fucking awesome engines but no one actually uses them?

I remember seeing the CryEngine 1 videos thinking "Wow! I'd love to see some games made on this!" and then CryEngine 2 was like "Wow! Not an amazing graphical leap, but if it lets developers develop on all 3 platforms that easily, I can't wait to see some games made on it!" and now again we have another tech demo of a Crytek engine... is anyone actually gonna use these damned engines for anything beyond the few mediocre games that Crytek themselves put out every now and then???

Apparently there are 40 games coming that will be built on CE3.

It's going to be hard dethroning Epic as the dominant gaming engine provider, though.

 

[socK]

socK,

according to your own citation, Crytek implemented forward rendering because they felt it was the best method for their design choices: namely a large-scale, outside, jungle environment

they switched to deferred rendering in crysis 2, not because forward rendering is "naive" as you claim, but because of the reasons listed in your own citation: "For the alien indoor environment that would probably be the best solution"

No, they say it's to not only help alleviate the shader permutation explosion, but because it also provides more consistent performance properties. They say that they're creating a giant "ubershader," in CE2 which is the root cause of it. They're presumably generating lots of shaders for every variation which in turn could probably hurt things like batching effectively (aka one of the biggest problems with PC, draw calls can be very expensive in comparison to consoles), etc. Looking back at their engine, it makes perfect sense as an upgrade. Hence "it scales better for the future."

consoles have particular restrictions that PC's don't have. optimizing for a console port does not necessarily mean that the PC version is unoptimized. You still haven't explained how you make that leap of logic. Even the developer's comments you are citing don't make that claim. The best one can say is that CryEngine 2 is not optimized for consoles. In fact, that's what he says. It was never intended to be used for games on any console.

Yeah, and they're BETTER than PC at certain things too. Yeah, the machine that has 1/16th or whatever of your PC's horsepower is faster at certain things. Something like threading is a perfect example of one of their optimizations. They probably use some kind of job based system, they're just feeding the system with abstract tasks and off it goes to plow away on a different thread. Particles, animation, collision, rendering, who knows? It doesn't matter, it's taking advantage of the parrallellism of multiple cores. That's the point, it's platform agnostic. CE2 wasn’t using multiple cores as well, they fixed / upgraded that, again it makes perfect sense for all platforms; PC, 360, PS3, they’re all multi core systems, and despite differences, there is the same, ultimate end goal -- USING THOSE CORES.

You then try and take the fact that subsequent games in the Crysis franchise run much better than the first Crysis game--even on the PC--as evidence that the PC version was unoptimized.

The problem with that position is that the subsequent games don't do as much with outdoor environments as the first game. If you tried to do Crysis 1 in CryEngine 3 who knows whether it would perform better or worse. You're making an assumption that the engine more optimized for the indoor, urban maps of Crysis 2 and, according to the developers' statements you quoted, specifically to address console limitations, would perform better than CryEngine 2.

Have you even played Crysis 2? There were lots of big, outdoor areas despite complaints.. There wasn’t any enormous open field tank battles like the first game. (AKA where my Tank was blown up in about 30 seconds I spent the next hour walking.) The whole game ran butter smooth.

Furthermore, people have imported Crysis 1 assets into the CE3 SDK, there’s been enormous maps there, there’s even been remade maps from the first game. Even Crysis 1 is now on consoles,

Since you and wonderfield are game developers or know so much about it, I suggest you get to that task. In fact, the developer you cited claimed in that thread he would welcome such a project. He might even help you if you PM'ed him.

Thankfully I'm already working on a hobby project, I've been working on framework and it's just getting to drawing it's first triangles soon, I want it to be a 2d tile engine, both DX11 and OGL can both get up and running in just a single line.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10565193/engine.jpg

There’s the main function, and I’d have to change none of it to get it to run on another platform like Linux. That stuff is hidden away in the backend and I’d probably just manage the switches at compile time.

And here's an old software renderer I wrote, which as boring as it looks, had lots of fast SSE (which was initially written in Assembly early on because older compilers were mentally retarded when it came to SSE intrinsics) code behind it, including vectorized bitmap alpha blending, 3d transforms, math stuff like matrix concatenation, etc.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10565193/sw2.png

I'm a self taught hobbyist (read: not professional or anywhere close) but I'm pretty confident that I'm not just pulling things out of thin air. I’ve written some pretty interesting things, I think, before.

Apparently there are 40 games coming that will be built on CE3.

It's going to be hard dethroning Epic as the dominant gaming engine provider, though.

They'll probably have quite a good shot at making a dent if they're on top of shit when next gen consoles hit.

 

[mope54]

CE2 wasn’t using multiple cores as well, they fixed / upgraded that, again it makes perfect sense for all platforms; PC, 360, PS3, they’re all multi core systems, and despite differences, there is the same, ultimate end goal -- USING THOSE CORES.

(Frank Stöwer, 25.08.2007)

Doug Binks, Intel [Source: view picture gallery]
"Practical multi-threading for game performance," was the title of a very practically oriented presentation, in which gave Leigh Davis of Intel and Doug Binks, from Crytek, developers, and especially programming, useful aids in the optimization of a game engine for multi-core processors.

After one put forward by Leigh Davis part with theoretical focus (task scheduling, task optimization, profiling, and performance measurement) Crytek programmer Doug Binks was in Medias Res and reported on the multi-threaded optimization of the Cry Engine 2

Crytek's technical foundation is a cross-platform product that uses very high quality settings on the power of multicore processors. Among the tasks that are then computed in parallel, including the data-streaming, audio and network physics, as well as the particle system. It runs the physics thread asynchronously with the game depend on logic, AI and animation of the physics calculations. The thread for the calculation of the particles is on the other hand synchronously executed at the main thread. However, particles are charged only when they are needed.

The performance benefits of a quad-core CPU illustrated Binks with a benchmark, the one carried out with a Core 2 Quad at 2.93 GHz and a Geforce 8800 and in which multi-threading for the physics and particle either has made and turned . The graphical analysis showed that the performance reached its maximum value when the calculation of particle physics and multithreading is used.

At the end of his very informative presentation delivered Binks still more concrete values. Thus, the total power increases through the effective use of multithreading and compared between a single and quad-core CPU by 98 percent. At least 60 percent more performance are possible if a processor with two cores instead of a single-core model is used.

--http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgameshardware.de%2F%3Farticle_id%3D610309&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Crysis 1 is now on consoles,

from the thread you posted earlier:

want a console now :baby:

LOL man, bought yourself that PC and want a console now? and for what?










The only scene of those shown in the comparison video, that shows a subjectively better picture. It is level design though with a rosy skybox and foggy bay at dawn, how poetic.





Interlaced imagery LOL


As for Xzero's comments.. I understand you work at theirs now man, so its alright.. Saying that CE2 was massively unoptimised is just just funny (not saying it isn't), then whats with the denying of that fact previously, like when the game came out and all the whining from the community. Any convenient lies as it seems is easily made up on an ad hoc basis isn't it? And why then name Crysis 2 graphics modes as High, Very high and so on? Was it not just having a laugh at those complaining Crysis ran at Medium on their Super-Rig back in 2007? Now any accusations about performance issues can be dismissed straight away as "It runs on high already, what more do you want" LOL.

I'm pretty confident that I'm not just pulling things out of thin air.

Apparently you are pulling some things out of thin air but more importantly out of context.