Crytek's CEO and founder Cevat Yerli gave the first keynote presentation at this year's GDC Europe event. "The Future of Gaming Graphics" gave an interesting retrospective view of the evolution of graphics over the last few years - primarily as seen through the various iterations of the CryENGINE, and then looked to tomorrow to see where things are going to go.

I was massively keen to see what Yerli had to say on the matter. Far Cry was a truly innovative step forward in first person shooters; as he pointed out during his presentation it came out at a time when FPS games were still largely corridor-based shooters set in dark, cramped and confined environments. Far Cry came along and shattered that old paradigm, boasting massive outdoor environments, bright lighting and vivid colours.

I had the chance to interview Yerli in San Francisco at a special press event in 2003, just before the release of Far Cry. After I smacked around a bunch of other journalists in deathmatch for a while, we sat down and had a good long chat about the game, and one thing I clearly remember is his enthusiasm for gaming and his sheer drive to make incredible games with the latest technology. Since then, CryENGINE has become one of the big names in game engine technology, standing comfortably alongside other huge brand names like "Unreal Engine" and "id Software".

So it was with high expectations and a strong desire to get a sneak peak of the future that I entered the room. After the introduction recapping the progress made over the last few years during the development of Far Cry and Crysis, we finally settled in to discussion of CryENGINE 3.

Unfortunately, one of the first slides quickly burned itself into my retinas - game engines aren't going to look that much different until around 2012. This at first might seem like a bold call, especially with the rapid pace of development of PC hardware. Yerli pointed out that most game developments these days are now bound by the console hardware cycle, and by his predictions we're not going to see a new iteration of that cycle until around 2012.

The implication was that engines like CryENGINE 3 are already pushing the limits of the current console hardware base, with the Crytek verdict being that there's not a lot more to get out of them.



Unless, of course, you're on a PC. The CryENGINE 3 has been developed from the ground up to be scalable - "amost limitless scalability", Yerli claims. It should be noted that the engine is basically the same between the PC and console versions, it's just that the console versions have various features enabled or disabled depending on their specific hardware. If you've seen the almost jaw droppingly awesome GDC trailer showing off some of the capabilities of the engine, you will no doubt be impressed.

Crytek are all over the increasingly common multi-core machines, and this is apparently a big part of how the engine will scale - CryENGINE 3 is ready for the next round of big hardware improvements; simply dropping in more CPU power will directly translate to the availability of more features.

By this point I suspect more than a few people were a little bit disappointed - myself included, because it was looking more and more like we weren't going to get to see some top secret new trailer showcasing some new engine features that would have the world abuzz with excitement. Yerli closed up by talking about some new potential techniques for graphics in games, such as Point Based Rendering and raytracing, as well as advantages of a new data structure called "Spare Voxel Octrees" - but these, he pointed out, are still a ways away.

Yerli concluded by saying that developers will probably need to focus on other areas to really make their games stand out from the pack - areas like artificial intelligence, artistic styling, physics and special effects - relying less on graphical superiority as we reach a bit of a plateau until the next major hardware shift.

For those of us out there that are increasingly worrying about about PC gaming getting stuffed into the back seat as far as game development goes, this doesn't sound like encouraging news. While it's great that PC versions of CryENGINE 3 games will scale nicely and gradually improve along with the better hardware as it becomes available, it's a little depressing to think they're somewhat locked in step with their crippled cousins, the fixed-hardware consoles.

It's especially depressing to think of these words coming from Crytek, who have stretched the boundaries of PC gaming visuals almost more than anyone else in recent times. Does this mean we're not going to see any quantum leaps in rendering technologies in gaming on the PC until the next version of the console - even though the hardware will continue unchecked? Is the PC market just not significant enough on its own (or is piracy too rampant) to justify it all the R&D it would take to make those sorts of strides?

While we'll no doubt see some big advances in a lot of areas of gaming in the years to come, Yerli's prediction is that the next big "graphical renaissance" won't happen until that next generation of console hardware lands. It'll be interesting to see how many developers follow his advice on using different ways to try and differentiate their games, and how many try to strike out for new territory in the graphical world anyway.

All that said - is it really a bad thing if we see less focus on graphics? We've all seen a lot of games come out over the last few years that have had almost nothing going for them other than flashy graphics - all glitter with no real substance. It would hardly be a bad thing for game developers to start paying attention to some of the other details. You only have to look at the Nintendo Wii's ridiculously huge sales to know that it's really not all about the most impressive graphics.