It’s getting harder to ‘wow’ people with graphics, Crytek says

Graphical standards are now so high that the challenge of impressing consumers with flash visuals is bigger then ever.

That’s according to Crytek’s principal rendering engineer Nicolas Schulz, who told DSOG of the PC port of Ryse: Son of Rome: 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.”

Schulz also said that even the highest-end PC gaming machines will find it virtually impossible to make use of the game’s 4K visuals on top quality settings.

For 60 frames per second you will definitely need a high-end GPU. For 30fps our recommended GPU configurations will be sufficient. Regarding VRAM, we adjust our texture pool based on the available graphics memory. While the maximum pool size is used with 3GB of VRAM, 2GB are enough to achieve great quality. Below that, we have to downscale some of the heavy textures a bit.

The current generation of high-end GPUs is unfortunately still far from being able to reach 60fps 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.”