There are still a lot of features in CryEngine that are not reproduced in other engines or are just worse.
Like whole shadowing tech in CE is the best of its class. Everything regarding water (shading, reflections, caustics), the volumetric fog, PoM and PADM, vegetation tech etc
Post-processing is also still the best in the industry.
Look I don't want to hate on CryEngine or anything. In fact, I used to love the engine (and the games) dearly.
Back when i was just a noob who made mods (Mechwarrior Living Legends amongst many many personal projects) I knew Sandbox in and out.
I've looked through the c_vars to find features that were not really used in the game.
I've made a long thread about a lot of Crysis 2 stuff (and later) here. The change from Crydev to CryEngine fucked a bit with the thing but yeah.
https://www.cryengine.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=355&t=69239
i just scrolled through and these are my words (on the second page)
Personal opinion:
Best realtime renderer in the world and my favorite engine
I do admit I didn't have any rendering knowledge back then.
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But now I do. I am not a pro, but I can write a renderer and that is more fun to me than some meddling around in very advanced engines.
However, from time to time I check out the newest version of CryEngine. Or Lumberjack. Or Unreal or Unity. And I am still mad when I see stuff like Kingdom Come using the wrong SVOGI settings by default. Infuriating, it could look much better.
Most importantly I do a lot of research on new graphics tech and I seen all official CryEngine, Frostbyte and Unreal Engine presentations along with most of the other new graphic gems showing up from other devs.
Not an expert, but an addict.
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Now let's go point by point.
Since I like to argue with random strangers on the internet I downloaded CE5.2 (the newest) and tried out everything.
Like whole shadowing tech in CE is the best of its class
So Crysis was special because they not only used PCF shadows like all the others, but they also rotated them on a poisson disk, which actually emulates some behaviour one can observe in real life when sun casting shadows from trees.
However, it's also noisy and a very coarse approximation that will "blur" always the same regardless of circumstance. That was fine for Crysis.
Another clever thing in Crysis1 was that they used VSM shadows for terrain and combined these very soft large shadows with the other shadows to great effect. That's not really relevant to anything without a map-terrain. VSMs are not effective for detail geometry.
- I checked in the current version and they still use the system. It's not bad, but it's noisy and unstable when moving the camera.
Then in the Crysis 2 update they added some form of soft penumbra shadows.
The implementation is ok for Crysis 2, but it's super limited (in terms of min/max penumbra) and has basically no grounding in any physical reality, it's merely a sort of bilateral blur. The implementation is not any better now as far as I can tell.
They have added some optimization like prerendering a large shadow map and not updating and not updating all shadow cascades every frame etc. for Crysis 2 and Ryze.
Plus some stuff like object-specific shadow maps and now some sort of Screen Space raymarched detail shadows. (They did have that in Crysis 2 already, but the reintroduction is listed as a new feature in the CryEngine 5.2 release)
I don't see how any of that is ground breaking. Meanwhile Unreal Engine introduces stuff like
Distance Field Shadows.
Everything regarding water (shading, reflections, caustics)
Fair
No, that's why Cloud Imperium redid it from scratch. CryEngine has an ok implementation for sunlight, but that's not what most people want (point lights it's where it's at). Volumetric particles etc. are handled very poorly and sun-only.
PoM and PADM, vegetation tech
Let's not disregard that CryEngine has a super rigid material system, a shader/material node editor does not exist. POM is not special, Silhoutte POM is.
The idea basically is to create a "fin" around the geometry with geometry shaders and raymarch the textures with an vector orthogonal from the camera direction in order to create the outlines. Pretty neat. Haven't seen it anywhere else.
Post-processing is also still the best in the industry.
Again, Cloud Imperium had to rewrite several parts of it. Most importantly the bloom - Star Citizen now has a state-of-the-art Call Of Duty / Unreal Engine type bloom.
But the rest of the post processing - Depth Of Field, Motion Blur are ok, but not best in class.
Also - note how eyelids and hair etc. are still handled incorrectly with a blurred background in Star Citizen footage.
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Now let's talk about the elephant in the room - reflections.
Believable screen space reflections are an absolute must for a modern engine. Ironically they were introduced in the DX11 patch for Crysis 2 but I'm not sure Crytek has done a lot with them.
Every other engine manages to create smooth reflections of mirror like surfaces, but CryEngine's implementation creates blocky, random artifacts as if their depth calculations are off.
Plus there is a hard cutoff for the maximum ray length, the SSR will reflect half the wall and then just stop without any sort of fade out (not talking about offscreen information).
-> see
here
But it gets even worse when not using absolute smooth, but rougher surfaces.
The big push in SSR has been to include importance sampling - basically reflections become blurrier the further the reflected object is away from the reflecting surface.
CryEngine does not have that.
The others do.
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I mean at this point the rendering of Star Citizen is pretty detached from what they originally got from Crytek. And I think it looks great, no doubt. And I'm sure we'll get many more cool effects from them until release.
But CryEngine itself is not the best renderer in 2016.