Tech Focus: Crysis 2 and the future of CryEngine 3

Our innovative real-time GI solution was not fully complete/robust on consoles yet, it still had visible issues/artefacts which we ran out of time to address. Due to this, also on consoles all milliseconds and memory counts, so at end of this project we made the tough decision to disable it for consoles. We still have a very simple and coarse GI approximation on consoles, where our art department fully controls the look, meaning we pay couple of ms on areas where it is actually making a significant visual contribution.

We have plans to optimise and extend our GI solution further but also to improve it, to make it more of a general solution, not just for sunlight.

If we want to be technically accurate, TAA is actually what is commonly known as Motion Blur. But TAA in gamer language is the naive denomination for the simplest form of amortisation of super sampling cost: a simple linear blending between current and previous frames sub-samples and which looks very similar to the old school cheap "motion blur" trick seen in many older games.

There is no re-projection involved. At 60FPS or more, this is ok and not easily perceptible, but it's not really useable for 30FPS or lower. PostMSAA 1.0 relies on previous frames re-projection and it's prone to artefacts when there are un-occluded pixels, most noticeable when camera is panning fast.

Although both techniques rely on amortising cost across frames, the end result and implementation is quite different.

MLAA costs around 3.5 ms on current consoles GPUs and still lacks subpixel accuracy like any other post processed approach. The Microsoft XDK edge blur solution is not useable at all on real world scenarios - except for a relatively graphically limited game.

MSAA, besides additional memory requirements, is not supported by PS3 hardware at all on alpha blended surfaces when rendering in HDR, like we do on CryEngine 3. And more globally it doesn't support alpha tested surfaces, without relying on ATOC, performs 0 shader anti-aliasing, plus final resolve needs to be done before tone mapping, which leads to incorrect results in high-contrast areas.

With PostMSAA 1.0, although this shipped version was far from perfect, all previous drawbacks are addressed and the cost was 1ms on console hardware, while on PC hardware the cost was irrelevant, in order of 0.2 ms at 1080p.

I believe in future, for the current console hardware generation we'll be seeing improved hybrids of our approach, allowing subpixel accuracy, with faster post processed techniques. NVIDIA's FXAA 2 for example looks quite promising and from what I've seen, was already 2x faster than MLAA.

PC DX9 version shipped with PostMSAA 1.0, plus enabled NVIDIA's FXAA 1 for extreme specs. DX11 will feature our next step in this area.

Crytek UK was working on the multiplayer part of Crysis 2 quite autonomously, however, we had to make sure it fits the overall game world and the Nano Suit experience. Direction and project leadership were coming from the main studio. Overall I think it was a collaborative, creative process where new ideas and features got exchanged between both studios for both the single and multiplayer part of the game.

CryEngine3 Sandbox for Cinema is a new version of our engine and it's actually being built in response to demand from the movie industry for us to make CryEngine more accessible to them.

I think the speed, quality and power of the CryENGINE renderer was the first thing that appealed to the film makers, but in speaking with them, we've discovered that so many of the advances we have made in real-time production for games over the last ten years, really apply to the movie industry in a big way.

So we're honing the tools, adding in some features that will help film makers and improve game cinematics and animation quality. The potential use of the engine is very broad and we're not closing any doors at this early stage; so while game graphics aren't quite good enough for a full scale movie production (yet!), there are many ways that CryEngine can save time, money and increase quality in the film and TV production. That's a powerful combination and we're being inundated with interest in the tools from all over the world.