14 DAY TRIAL // Crysis and CryEngine developer Crytek was one of the first developers to assist the Xbox One computer entertainment system in its quest to wow the masses with its graphics prowess, and the company's action adventure title Ryse: Son of Rome proved to be one of the most gorgeous games of last year.
Although Ryse: Son of Rome had quite a few faults, the level of visual fidelity and performance was not among them, which also landed Crytek a SIGGRAPH award for Best Real-Time Graphics.
Ryse was running in 900p, as opposed to the 1080p standard that developers are pushing with their next-gen video games, and in spite of that, it still managed to look great, which attests to Crytek's strength as a developer.
However, the development process was not without hitches, and during their talk at SIGGRAPH, two of the studio's lead engineers, Nicolas Schulz and Theodor Mader, revealed more information regarding the current generation of consoles and its hardware, and how it scaled when compared to the high-end PCs of today.
Their talk was mainly focused on the development of Ryse: Son of Rome for the Xbox One platform, and they spoke freely about the challenges that they faced when developing for Microsoft's next-gen system.
"Console hardware [is] considerably less powerful than high-end PCs at launch. Adding just more (effects, higher resolution etc.) is not an option on weaker hardware," the two commented in relation to rendering challenges.
The slideshow also reveals that Ryse ended up running in 900p resolution and at 30 frames per second mainly because the Xbox One could not handle all the effects at the time.
The console's dedicated, lightning-fast GPU RAM is also an issue, primarily because there is only 32 MB of it, which many developers found difficult to work around. Crytek mentioned that due to the presence of only 32 MB of ESRAM, it was not able to add any MSAA (anti-aliasing effects that result in smoother lines and edges) to Ryse: Son of Rome at launch.
In addition to this, super-sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) was only present in the pre-recorded cutscenes when Ryse: Son of Rome was launched on the Xbox One, once again due to the limitation of the hardware and development environment.
Crytek now plans to release Ryse: Son of Rome on PC later this year, publishing the retail edition independently and relying on Deep Silver for the boxed retail edition. The developers intend to step up the game's visual fidelity for PC users, relying on the superior hardware of high-end gaming rigs to truly make the game shine.
Below, you can view a series of videos from SIGGRAPH that developer Crytek shared, casting a revealing light behind the scenes of AAA game making.
