Crytek has unveiled its most recent variant of their roadmap. The new roadmap has unveiled Crytek will be bringing support for DirectX 12, Vulkan, and raytracing to CRYENGINE, similar to the Neon Noir demo.
CRYENGINE 5.6 - 5.7's Foundation
CRYENGINE 5.6 will introduce the following features:
- Mesh/Opaque Particle Casting Shadows
- Render Optimization Pass
- Tesselated Particle Ribbons
- Opaque Particle Z-Buffer
- Memory Footprint Reduction
- CPU Optimization
CPU Optimization is most likely improved support for high core count CPUs. This will be beneficial to gamers using future Ryzen 3000 CPUs with CRYENGINE taking advantage of Zen 2's design. The same goes for gamers running high core count Intel Core X-Series CPUs. CRYENGINE 5.6 will lay the foundation for CryEngine 5.7 and will be released within the summer of 2019.
CRYENGINE 5.7 - Modern Improvements to CRYENGINE
CRYENGINE 5.7 is set for a release in the spring of 2020. CRYENGINE 5.7 brings multiple new features, all major improvements over the previous variants of CRYENGINE:
- Support for Oculus Quest
- Improved VR Support
- Area Lights Implementation
- Improved Multiple View Rendering
- Opaque Particles/Deferred Lighting
- Optimized Dynamic Instancing
- DirectX 12 Implementation
- Vulkan Implementation
- Raytracing Implementation
The three most notable additions to CRYENGINE are DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Raytracing. Crytek is known for their advanced optimization, getting the most performance out of the user's hardware, and with DirectX 12 and Vulkan support, performance improvements will be even greater. DirectX 12 and Vulkan are sure to provide decent performance bumps to Radeon GPUs. DirectX 12 and Vulkan will bring asynchronous compute support to CRYENGINE, an option GCN had been designed to take advantage of.
If CRYENGINE is designed with the same concept as Neon Noir, Radeon GPUs may be given the ability to perform raytracing operations.
CRYENGINE 5.8 - Future Updates
CRYENGINE 5.8 will build upon CRYENGINE 5.7. CRYENGINE 5.8 will add support for Multi-GPU DX12 configurations. Another addition will also be support for NVIDIA Ansel. Other additions for CRYENGINE 5.8 include:
- Deferring RenderObject Compilation to Job Threat
- Distance LOD Merging
- Vegetation Spine Animation on GPU
- Pixel Shader to Compute Shade
- Order Independent Transparency
- Parallax Skybox
- Parametric Surface Support
- Physically Based Material Blending
CRYENGINE - Raytracing Performance
Depending on how well CRYENGINE handles raytracing operations and multi-GPU configurations, multi-GPU configurations may become a viable option for power users. Crytek previously implemented nearly perfect scaling for AMD's Fiji GPUs, and due of the nature of raytracing, these types of operation scale well across multiple CPU cores, and should do the same for multiple GPUs.
