Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome first released for the Xbox One but it’s now heading to PC, which means the development team will be able to take advantage of more powerful hardware for enhanced visuals. Considering the base game already looked good, just how much more could Crytek improve the experience?
We spoke to senior producer Brian Chambers about the changes made to CryEngine since Ryse’s release last year and whether they would affect the PC version. “There are several new engine features that made it into the Ryse PC version. We added support for upscaling the scene to the native monitor resolution and provide the option to render with supersampling. We also further improved our temporal AA solution for Ryse PC and increased the shadow quality.”
As for graphical updates that fans could expect over the Xbox One version, Chambers stated that, “We worked hard to bring players the level quality that we had on Xbox One, and we continued to push it for Ryse PC. 4K resolution support enhances textures and high-frequency shading details. Higher resolution shows more of the texture details, especially on Marius, as the textures contain so much detail at the top MIP levels that it’s often not even visible on 1080p resolution.
“Higher resolution also means less perceived aliasing since geometry is rasterized more accurately, pixels are smaller. Other additions, such as super-sampling AA (SSAA), make for a very clean image with minimized shimmering. Unlike post processing AA or MSAA (multi-sample anti aliasing), super sampling truly shades pixels at higher resolution and then combines blocks of them into an average. This produces a kind of aliasing that is hard to beat with other methods since the high res image information is not visible.
“Native desktop resolution UI support in full-screen means the UI always looks crisp, even if it’s run in lower resolution for performance reasons. Desktop resolution is usually the highest resolution any display supports and thus gives a clear and sharp image. However, games often cannot run at these resolutions at full details. Native resolution provides a compromise in that it allows the game to render the 3d world at a lower (user configurable) resolution if desired. The resulting image is then upscaled to desktop resolution and UI rendered on top. This provides crisp UI on top of a smooth gameplay experience.”
What are your thoughts on Ryse: Son of Rome for PC? Will you be picking it up when it releases on October 10th? Let us know below.
