Ontwikkelaar Crytek staat er behoorlijk om bekend dat men visuele pracht en praal hoog in het vaandel heeft staan. Dat begon al ten tijde van Far Cry en later ook Crysis, maar ook met het recente Ryse: Son of Rome doet men er alles aan om sublieme visuals op het scherm te toveren. Toch wordt het steeds moeilijker om spelers nog te verbazen met high-end graphics, zo vertelt Nicolas Schulz van Crytek:
I think with its advances in material quality, lighting and the quality of facial animations, Ryse is extending the boundaries of realtime graphics quite a bit again. Generally though, as opposed to the times of the original Crysis, we as an industry have reached a quality level now where it is getting increasingly more difficult to really wow people. That said, there’s still enough areas to explore and we will definitely keep pushing the boundaries as much as possible.Net als concullega’s Insomniac en DICE werkt Crytek momenteel vooral aan het optimaliseren van hun eigen engine. De CRYENGINE zou nog makkelijker te gebruiken en meer flexibel moeten worden.
Kan men grafisch dan niets meer doen? Zeker wel, zo vervolgt Schulz. Op het gebied van resolutie en framerates kan er nog veel terrein gewonnen worden met 60FPS en 4K in beeld. Daarnaast lopen de consoles van nature achter op high-end pc’s, zo benadrukt Schulz:
The current generation of high-end GPUs is unfortunately still far from being able to reach 60 FPS at 4K resolution. Please keep in mind that with 4K versus 1080p, you have four times the amount of pixels that need to be shaded. This is very quickly saturating the available bandwidth.The consoles are clearly behind high-spec GPUs in terms of raw horsepower, however on the positive side, they share the same modern architecture which enables a wealth of interesting optimization techniques. Due to the console differences we had to work a bit harder on the final optimizations but I’m happy that we never had to sacrifice any visual quality.