Game Engine Showdown!

We put the top three next-gen game engines under the microscope and pit them against each other

You can argue all you want that gameplay supplants graphics in the priorities of game design, but with fairly competent 3D accelerators in almost every modern PC, combined with the growing penetration of fast, dual-core CPUs, not to mention the proliferation of powerful game consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it has become expected that games will not only look good, but play good.

So important are visuals in today’s games, that one’s impression of a title can be influenced heavily by a glistening screenshot that seems to defy reality by being, well, too real.

Crytek’s Crysis is probably the best example of a game that could potentially be utterly woeful, but thanks to graphics so detailed and perfectly lush, we’re all giddy with excitement at the prospect of playing it, even though no one has yet to actually play it.

Promises of completely destructible terrain, bending foliage, totally dynamic lighting and, the cherry on this polygon-shaped cake, Direct3D 10 support, has the gaming media at large hypnotised.

It’s odd, then, that other than two low-key developers, no one has gone out of their way to license CryENGINE2, the beating heart of Crytek’s opus. Could it be that there’s more to a game engine than just graphics?

Of course there is.

This is just one reason why Atomic decided to take a look at the game engines that will be the most prominent in the years to come, technology with the potential to be used in games other than those they were originally developed for. It was a hard choice to focus on just a few, but we finally nailed down the three we believe to not only be the best, but have the highest chance of finding their way into the work of other developers. Those engines were Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, Valve’s Source and, of course, Crytek’s CryENGINE2.