CryTek Far Cry Interview

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CryTek Far Cry Interview

 

"FiringSquad: Which aspects of shader model 3.0 are you taking advantage of?

 

Cevat Yerli: We’re using looping and branching mainly. We’re using the floating point FP16 FP 32 of course. But mainly we’re using the aspect of making sure that more lighting can be accomplished with flow control and branching so we can encode for example 4 lights in one pass, which is speeding up the rendering. Our utilization of 3.0 shader model is essentially tied to performance improvements. So for example we can render, previously with 2.0 we were rendering one light per pass and now we’re rendering up to four lights per pass.

Second aspect is that we’re using geometry instancing which is a big performance gainer, mostly for outdoors but also for indoors. On the outdoors we’re using for example to reduce the draw calls from trees, grass, and other vegetation objects, we’re using the same or similar object meshes in different positions and orientations. They’re rendered in one draw call with different attributes in the vertex shader. That reduces the draw calls."

 

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"FiringSquad: In addition to SM 3.0, Far Cry will also be patched to take advantage of AMD’s 64-bit architecture in the future – what changes are you implementing in the 64-bit version of Far Cry?

 

Cevat Yerli: We’ve done it mainly for content development creators and mod creators, there will be huge benefits from it. For the gameplay it will be more beneficial to the environment, you will have some specific content for 64-bit. There will be a 64-bit version of Far Cry, a separate one eventually. That will be essentially content-wise slightly improved over the 32-bit version but it’s not something which, I mean people with the 32-bit version can still compare to the 64-bit version, but it’s optimized for the 64-bit experience. And the user of course will benefit from the 64-bit CPU architecture, which is more registers, better memory controller, but also more addressable memory."