Speaking with
Venturebeat, Crytek founder, Cevat Yerli, lashed out at the recently unveiled Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games, claiming that "CryEngine 3 already exists at the quality of Unreal Engine 4", and dug his heels in by adding that CryEngine 3 had been around "for three years now" in this apparent state of quality.
"You can go back three years ago to the GDC videos," he asserted with his claim. "What we put out there is pretty much what Unreal Engine 4 put out now. And what many others are doing now too. We haven't really put out our latest stuff yet.
"We [have] already said CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago," he said.
There's no denying CryEngine 3's feature-set or visual fidelity, but these are big claims. Whether or not he's talking more about the latter, or soapboxing about the former is hard to discern, but he definitely stands by the Crytek
tech.
"If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it's what we were seeing three years ago," he continued. "We already had massive particle systems, we already had GPU rendering, all these things. Deferred shading. We had tessellation already since we shipped Crysis 2. We already had DX11. We didn't just talk it up as tech demos, we have games that are shipped and are doing it."
In case you missed it, Epic released an epic video showing off their next-gen engine, and it certainly doesn't fail to deliver in the wow-department. Check it out embedded below, or
right here for a direct link. You can also watch a 10-minute video detailing the
new engine's feature-set right here.
Posted 11:31am 15/6/12
Posted 12:15pm 15/6/12
Then again, he didn't say anything about performance. A lot of the changes they've made to make dev's lives easier has been in Crytek since Cryengine 1. Many more since 2 and 3. Epic are much better at coding in my opinion and make beautiful engines that run on anything - very similar to Valve's abilities.
Fact is, Unreal 4 will smash it next gen. Nothing new to learn for devs, will probably run like a hot knife through butter and will look great and be very upgradeable. Look at the last Unreal Engine 2 games to come out and compare them to the first games to come out on the engine... they know their s*** and studios buy into it.
Crysis 1's lack of hardware utilization (never seen it use more than 30% of system resources) and huge tessellation c*** up with Crysis 2 is testament to Crytek's inability to generate content *efficiently*. Sure, it's beautiful as all hell, but it doesn't run well. And it damn well should.
Posted 02:19pm 15/6/12
Crytek though have been quite vocal about how consoles are holding back the technology for game engines for a long time now.
I have to say, whenever I load up Crysis 2 SP, i do get amazed at how amazing it looks. Hopefully Crysis 3 should be quite a bit better. Console optimisation issues are worked out for the engine. So they can actually fully impliment the features for PC.