Essential Linkage: How id's engine will power the next wave of games.
id Software are renowned and well-known for their incredibly popular Doom series, as well as Quake and all spinoffs, perhaps best known for their solid gameplay and beautiful games.
They've been developing their latest engine for quite some time, but since they're designing it first and foremost for consoles there's a different mindset being applied to the development that makes the Tech 5 engine unique.
First and foremost is the challenge that all developers face when porting their game inbetween the radically different console architectures - from the Xbox 360's triple-cored CPU and powerful GPU, to the PS3's Cell CPU and slightly less capable GPU.
Knowing that the architectures for the CPUs are very specific, the first design choice was to take as much of the workload and move it to the GPU, which thanks to the inherently parallel design is predictably reliable on both systems.
It's summarised well in the presentation from Siggraph:
Logical GPU Architecture Stable -DX9 == nirvana for conventional hardware graphics -programmable stages, fixed topology
CPU Architectures all over the map -Fast single core model definitely dead -Homogenous / Symmetric processors (PC, XBox) •big cores w/ cache, 1-2 hardware threads / core •some have complicated out-of-order processing -Heterogeneous processors (Cell) •1-2 big cores •multiple small in-order cores w/ local memory & DMA controller
An absolutely stunning virtual texturing system has been developed to allow streaming of very detailed textures, while also managing to split up the gameworld into easily manageable chunks.
There are also plenty of screenshots shown of the engine itself, showing the most breathtaking skies short of custom high-res mods, and some of the most astounding scenery that doesn't seem possible to run on mere consoles.
Head to the presentation in PDF form for lots of info and screenshots, via Tomshardware.
What do you think of the engine? Post below!
Issue: 107 | December, 2009