Crysis 2: Everything about DirectX 11, 3D without perfomance-drop and 8-core-optimization

Please keep in mind: The details following details are referring to the CryEngine 3 (CE3) in general and can’t necessarily be linked with Crysis 2!

At the gamescom 2010, Crytek’s field applications engineer Sean Tracy showed to PC Games Hardware a live demonstration of the CryEngine 3 in stereoscopic 3D. Of course in real time (“What You See Is What You Play”) within the poweful editor Sandbox 3. Instead of rendering each picture twice (half the framerate!) and projecting it on a dedicated 120 Hz LCD monitor, Crytek simply uses the back buffer and the depth information in the graphics card: The renderred 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 1.280 x 720 (720p) without anti aliasing with 30 fps (vertically synchronised; wether double or triple buffering was enabled Sean couldn’t tell us). The CryEngine-3-maxim corresponds with what John Carmack said about the 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 the 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 the CE2. The presentation was done on a Core-i7-920 with 6 GiByte RAM and a Geforce GTX 260 with DirectX 9. As far as we’ve seen it, the demonstration ran smoothly – despite some toying around with the effects in the Sandbox 3.

Read the whole story here.