So, I'm not sure how I searched this, but I found some slideshows Johan Andersson, from DICE, posted about the Frostbite engine.
These slidesshows may not be for the faint of heart. Some go into DEEP detail that may make your head explode. I know mine came close a few times and I even had to google a few terms to figure some things out. They were made for an audience that does all this stuff for a living.
But for those that want to know more about this Frostbite engine and what the goal was (or is in the case of BF3), this may interest you.
This slideshow covers why Frostbite. It was made in 2007:
This slideshow covers where DICE wanted to take Frostbite. It was made in 2009:
This slideshow is a more updated one of the "where is frostbite" and was made about 8 months ago:
This slideshow covers why DX11. Also was done 2 years ago:
There are a few other slideshows, but they are a bit repetitive. This makes me excited to see what Frostbite 2.0 has to offer since their focus on the 2.0 engine has been to get more things onto the GPU and make CPU/GPU and software work together better. Also, Frostbite 2.0 has been fine tuned a lot since the start of all this.
It may also explain why DICE chose to seperate the engine into a console and a PC version of it.
One thing I noticed while going through all these slides, and this may not be a big surprise, consoles are holding this engine back. Maybe this is all marketing hype, but we've played on the engine now ourselves, and it seems to me that Frostbite is a next generation engine. DICE has been saying this for some time, but you know how that goes. Everyone thinks they have the latest thing.
This article explains some of the things Frostbite 2.0 will be doing:
It says:
So with these new features and the slides, it seems to me that DICE isn't dropping XP/DX9 because of hardware limitations of the engine, but because of the features Frostbite 2.0 needs in DX11.
So even though you may need to update your graphics card or OS, it may not be as system intensive as first thought. Though this all makes it obvious that if you have a quad core, 64 bit, and plenty of RAM, you will get more out of FB2.0 than if you did not.
TL;DR Version:
Forstbite 2.0 is going to be awesome should run a lot better and I see why they seperated PC and console version and went with DX11 only.
Crunch
These slidesshows may not be for the faint of heart. Some go into DEEP detail that may make your head explode. I know mine came close a few times and I even had to google a few terms to figure some things out. They were made for an audience that does all this stuff for a living.
But for those that want to know more about this Frostbite engine and what the goal was (or is in the case of BF3), this may interest you.
This slideshow covers why Frostbite. It was made in 2007:
This slideshow covers where DICE wanted to take Frostbite. It was made in 2009:
This slideshow is a more updated one of the "where is frostbite" and was made about 8 months ago:
This slideshow covers why DX11. Also was done 2 years ago:
There are a few other slideshows, but they are a bit repetitive. This makes me excited to see what Frostbite 2.0 has to offer since their focus on the 2.0 engine has been to get more things onto the GPU and make CPU/GPU and software work together better. Also, Frostbite 2.0 has been fine tuned a lot since the start of all this.
It may also explain why DICE chose to seperate the engine into a console and a PC version of it.
One thing I noticed while going through all these slides, and this may not be a big surprise, consoles are holding this engine back. Maybe this is all marketing hype, but we've played on the engine now ourselves, and it seems to me that Frostbite is a next generation engine. DICE has been saying this for some time, but you know how that goes. Everyone thinks they have the latest thing.
This article explains some of the things Frostbite 2.0 will be doing:
It says:
BF3 will also be using a brand new engine, Frostbite 2.0. This will have full support for directx11 and 64-bit processors.
Some more features of Frostbite 2.0 include:
•“Tile-based deferred shading acceleration” via DirectCompute. This is being ported to the PlayStation 3′s SPUs.
• Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.[4] MLAA is currently available only to a few PlayStation 3 games such as God of War III and LittleBigPlanet 2. DICE intends to bring this feature to DirectX 11 GPUs.
•Quasi-realtime radiosity.•Improved environment destruction.
Some more features of Frostbite 2.0 include:
•“Tile-based deferred shading acceleration” via DirectCompute. This is being ported to the PlayStation 3′s SPUs.
• Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.[4] MLAA is currently available only to a few PlayStation 3 games such as God of War III and LittleBigPlanet 2. DICE intends to bring this feature to DirectX 11 GPUs.
•Quasi-realtime radiosity.•Improved environment destruction.
So even though you may need to update your graphics card or OS, it may not be as system intensive as first thought. Though this all makes it obvious that if you have a quad core, 64 bit, and plenty of RAM, you will get more out of FB2.0 than if you did not.
TL;DR Version:
Forstbite 2.0 is going to be awesome should run a lot better and I see why they seperated PC and console version and went with DX11 only.
Crunch
Comment