Battlefield 3 Producer Shares Details On Next-Gen Game's DX11 Support
Battlefield 3 has become something of a hot item in recent months thanks to the game's incredible visuals and gameplay videos that have left long-time fans of the series salivating. BF3 is the sequel to Battlefield 2 (released back in 2005), and while it's designed for XBox 360, PS3, and PC, the game was built around the PC platform, somewhat of a rarity in the modern age of console-dominated sales.
In this video, GeForce.com's Kris Rey sits down to have a chat with DICE producer Patrick Liu. The Frostbite 2 engine that BF3 uses was designed for the title and, according to Liu, includes a number of improvements.
"“We added a ton of stuff – we basically rewrote the rendering engine from scratch to add real-time radiosity on the PC," said Liu. "It produces amazing indoor lighting… for the scale of the maps we implemented new streaming technology, so we make bigger maps than we have ever been able to before.”
There's a deeply ironic moment at ~1:40 in the video: when asked to list some of the engine's DX11 features, Liu refers to tessellation "doing great on NVIDIA cards," at which point Kris Rey notes "We do love tessellation."
HH loves tessellation too, which is why it's so frustrating that statements like this jump out like big red flags. After the incredibly dubious uses of tessellation in HAWX 2 and Crysis 2, the first question upon hearing a game supports DX11 isn't "does it make the game look better," but "are the DX11 features implemented in a way that enhances in-game visuals without unfairly tilting the competitive landscape towards Nvidia?"
Hopefully the answer is "yes." BF3 looks like a great game and many would prefer not to see it weighed down with such controversies. No word on minimum specs yet, save for the utterly unhelpful news that it should run just fine on dual GTX 580s. Robust DX9 support should keep the game playable, even on relatively modest GPUs.
"“We added a ton of stuff – we basically rewrote the rendering engine from scratch to add real-time radiosity on the PC," said Liu. "It produces amazing indoor lighting… for the scale of the maps we implemented new streaming technology, so we make bigger maps than we have ever been able to before.”
There's a deeply ironic moment at ~1:40 in the video: when asked to list some of the engine's DX11 features, Liu refers to tessellation "doing great on NVIDIA cards," at which point Kris Rey notes "We do love tessellation."
HH loves tessellation too, which is why it's so frustrating that statements like this jump out like big red flags. After the incredibly dubious uses of tessellation in HAWX 2 and Crysis 2, the first question upon hearing a game supports DX11 isn't "does it make the game look better," but "are the DX11 features implemented in a way that enhances in-game visuals without unfairly tilting the competitive landscape towards Nvidia?"
BF3's gameplay as demonstrated in multiple vehicles and on foot. The new Frostbite 2 engine looks great
Hopefully the answer is "yes." BF3 looks like a great game and many would prefer not to see it weighed down with such controversies. No word on minimum specs yet, save for the utterly unhelpful news that it should run just fine on dual GTX 580s. Robust DX9 support should keep the game playable, even on relatively modest GPUs.
