Graphics Engines

E

Eternal

Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
OK There is ALOT of different video game engines out there right now, source, crytek, unreal3, gamebryo, ect ect.

Which ones in your opinion are the best?

I'm a big fan of Source's engine it is optimized well and the amount of additions to the engine over the years has effectively made the current source engine twice as good as the original. Although it is getting on in years (released '04) it STILL has in my opinion some of the best quality facial capabilities and lip synch (the games I've seen that use it the faces are much more.. believable than and human feeling than the stuff on engines like Unreal3 or Gamebryo)

The computer I'm on is able to run the single player Crysis demo in 1200/1024 with all settings on High and 2x anti-aliasing with around a 30-40fps average (not certain as I have no display in the demo but judging from my years of FPS playing and tweaking)

I'm kinda wondering though why it is that I can run Left 4 Dead on 1600/1200 all settings maxed out and get 40fps at the lowest, with an average of around 65-70. And I'm able to run Crysis on 1600/1200 with everything cept shadows and objects on high, or in 1200/1024 with EVERYTHING set to high. And yet when I play Fallout 3 or Oblivion using the gamebryo engine my computer barely gets 10fps if I set everything to maximum (even with anti-aliasing OFF as I've heard its pretty much broken in gamebryo) I have to run everything on around medium settings in 1600/1200 mode in FO3 and I still have spots where my FPS drops down to the 20s when I'm outside.
 
Most impressive engine for me probably is Cryengine 2 now. Visuals that are yet to matched by another engine since 2007 (Crysis), great physics, big areas rendered and colours look like real colours, and not some brown/grey shit that's usually present in "next-gen" games. Crysis does require a powerful machine, but in case of this game requirements are justified, only game that has truly impressive "realistic" graphics (when they are set on very high).
Source comes close too, cause it still looks really nice and runs great too. Has quite a longevity too, given all the updates it received since 2004.
 
Most of today's commercial game engines are comparable in terms of capabilites, but CryEngine 2 probably has the most impressive visuals, so it's probably the best from gamers' standpoint. There are, however, two crucial, if overlooked criteria for evaluating game engines - tools and quality of the architecture. No matter how fast and feature-packed an engine is, if its architecture is convoluted and poorly documented or if it lacks well-designed, powerful and stable tools to accompany it, any team working with the engine will have an extremely hard time implementing their ideas. And from what I have seen so far, Epic consistently delivers the best-engineered commercial engines with finest editors. So if I were a AAA game developer, there is no question as to what engine I would opt for - Unreal Engine 3, all the way.
 
SuAside said:
it's not the engine, it's what you do with it. ;)
Click to expand...

Yup, althought I love what people have done with Source so far. Did you ever play Stranglehold? It was pretty much universally reviled but I actually enjoyed it as a translation of John Woo movies into a game and they did great things with the Quake 3 engine, such as generate faces randomly to give more variety and allow you to blow up pretty much everything in real time.

The CryEngine2 seems a bit wasteful to me, althought I love blasting things to bits with it as well. Still even on really fancy computers you will see objects materializing a few feet away from the player.
 
Project offset seems quite promising. Intel thought so too and bought it.

It seems they might be able to produce quite an impressive in-game experience
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVk1GArKqfo[/youtube]

And how they work:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KH7Wbi0clo[/youtube]

More interesting stuff at: http://www.projectoffset.com
 
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