GDC09: Why next-generation CryEngine will only show in 2012

By Michael J Huelskoetter (68 posts) on August 17, 2009 at 10:41 pm

During his very well received keynote session Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli surprised us with his statement that the next-generation Crytek game engine only will be availabel in about three years. The reason for this is quite simple: Instead of considering the PC as the only game platform, Crytek will focus on XBox and PlayStation in the future. And the next-generation video game consoles will be released in 2012 - or even later.

Beyond that Cevat's keynote presentation wasn't too spectacular, but offered interesting insights into the evolution of CryEngine. The first gaming title based on CryEngine was Far Cry which was developed between 2001 and 2004. Far Cry was really a revolution as it showed brand-new effects like Pixel Shading, Bump Mapping, Vertex Shading, HDR and many more.

In November 2007 Crysis came out which is based on CryEngine 2. Crytek is considering CryEngine 2 as an important step regarding photo-realistic rendering. A huge difference to the predecessor's engine was its improved scalability - in terms of content and pipelining.

And now CryEngine 3 is the next big thing although it's still in beta. But the new features are already very impressive: It supports multi-core platforms and offers revolutionary graphics improvements. But also the developing backend is spectacular: As you can see on the Crytek's booth, the developer system permits the parallel creation of a game level for PC, Xbox and PlayStation at the same time. This allows simultaneous testing of a new level. We will show this in a video post later. So stay tuned.

But of course Cevat also looked into the future: He considers future graphics processors more and more efficient as they calculate in parallel and will become a general-purpose processor unit (say 'hello' to Larrabee!). Apart from that I found it quite surprising that we have to wait until 2012 before we will see gaming titles with non-fixed resolution. And so game developers have to concentrate even more on better game designs, more powerful physics engines and smarter AI.

Right after his keynote we had four small questions which Cevat answered crisp and clear. He is talking briefly about his presentation, about the specific features of CryEngine 3, about the next-generation graphics engine and why Larrabee can be very helpful for Crytek.

Categories: Events, Gaming, Parallel Programming, Visual Computing

Comments (1)

August 24, 2009 10:33 AM PDT

Maximillian Domeika (Intel)
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 Thanks. I'm a fan of Crysis. The graphics are impressive. Interestingly, you mention the continuing trend of games developers paying more attention perhaps even prioritizing the game consoles over the pc. I do believe there is an opportunity for consolidation as the cost for developers to validate on the different platforms may be problematic moving forward.

Max

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