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Abstract

In this chapter we do not present one specific algorithm; instead we try to describe the approaches the German company named Crytek took to find certain rendering algorithms that work well together. We believe this information is valuable for anyone that wants to implement similar rendering algorithms because often the implementation challenges arise when combining with other algorithms. We will also describe briefly the path to it as that covers alternative approaches you also might want to consider. This is not a complete description of everything that was done on the rendering side because for this chapter we picked certain areas that are of interest specifically for this audience and limited ourselves to a presentable extend.

The work presented here takes significant advantage of research done by the graphics community in recent years and combines it with novel ideas developed within Crytek to realize implementations that efficiently map onto graphics hardware.

Conclusion

Through some intricate path we not only found our next generation engine but we also learned a lot. That learning process was necessary to find, validate and compare different solutions so in retro perspective it can be classified to research. Why we chose certain solutions in favor of others is mostly because of quality, production time, performance and scalability. Crysis, our current game, is a big scale production and to handle this the production time is very important. Performance of a solution is hardware dependent (e.g. CPU, GPU, memory) so on a different platform we might have to reconsider. The current engine is streamlined for a fast DirectX9/DirectX10 card with one or multiple CPU cores.

Having the depth from the early z pass turned out to be very useful; many features now rely on this functionality. Regular deferred shading also stores more information per pixel like the diffuse color, normal and other material properties. 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.


http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm...FTOKEN=6184618