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The Skinny: Developed by Epic Games, Inc.; fully licensable, SDK free for non-commercial projects
You Know it From: Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands, Mass Effect 1 & 2, BioShock 1 & 2, Gears of War series, many many more
The Lowdown: The reigning king of game engines, Unreal Engine 3 has seen amazing support and adoption across just about every platform imaginable. Officially debuting in 2007's Unreal Tournament 3, Epic Games industry-dominating engine of mass destruction has been the platform of choice for triple-A titles on the Xbox360, PS3, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Linux…hell, you probably have a toaster running UE3 games. UE3 earns an extra gold star for even managing to endear itself to Japanese game studios, who've traditionally eschewed Western dev tools and production models.
While Epic's development, improvement, and iteration move forward at a blistering pace, it can be hard to keep track of their build revisions. Today's Unreal Engine might still be number 3, but the UE3 of 2011 is infinitely more robust than its initial 2007 version. Not content to rest on their laurels, Epic continues to push the engine forward: they wowed the crowd at E3 2011 with a demo reel showcasing the amazing capabilities of the Unreal Engine, and UE4 (already late in development) is expected to officially release in 2012 or 2013—just in time for the next wave of consoles and hardware improvements.
Strengths: Unreal Engine 3's greatest strength lies in its amazingly robust feature set. Quick to implement new technology, UE3 supports both DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0. Its rendering capabilities are amongst the strongest in the industry, with full support for high dynamic range rendering, per-pixel lighting, soft shadows, tessellation, displacement mapping, bokeh depth of field, multiple reflection modes, and advanced rendering and simulation of soft body objects (like hair and cloth).
UE3 has native support for many top industry middlewares such as SpeedTree and Bink Video (more on them later) and is integrated with Steamworks. UE3 also supports physics engines like Havok and PhysX.
Due to UE3's wide adoption, its toolsets are constantly refined, and the massive online knowledge base and accessible developer community make finding information easy. UE3 is also free to download, and no license is needed if developing for educational or personal use; a small licensing is required for small-scale commercial/indy projects.
Weaknesses: Since Unreal Engine 3 is featured in so many games, it can be tough to pinpoint failings of the engine, or failings of individual games. Some persistent weaknesses are present over multiple iterations of UE3, however. Always quick to innovate, UE3 beat Id Tech 5 to the pop-in party by several years. Also quick to iterate, they manage to keep that Pop-In Fresh, as UE3 games are notoriously plagued by not just texture pop-in, but geometry, object, and terrain pop-in. Prepare to be dazzled as mountains, foliage, and characters spontaneously spring into existence before your very eyes.
"I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite store on the Ci-... ooh shiny!"
Another area where the Unreal Engine really "shines" is lighting skin and flesh, creating characters who look either plastic, sweaty, or somehow both. Other aspects of the UE3 lighting model can look a bit funky at times as well, with odd reflective surfaces, jagged shadows, and clipped shadow and light maps.
Coming Soon: Mass Effect 3, Borderlands 2, BioShock Infinite, Tribes Ascend, Dust 514
The Skinny: Developed by Crytek; SDK released October 2009, first featured March 2011; commercially licensable
You Know it From: Crysis (console re-release), Crysis 2, Aion
The Lowdown: Originally developed by German developer CryTek for an Nvidia techdemo, CryEngine went on to put the Cry in FarCry, and later the Crysis series of games. It then proceeded to put the Cry in a generation of PC gamers who couldn't get the technical behemoth that was the original Crysis to run in any playable fashion. "Can it run Crysis?" The answer was a resounding "no" for years after its initial release until the current generation of multi-GPU cards eventually wrestled the feisty CryEngine 2 to the ground.
CryEngine v3 may not seem to add much over the already eye-popping splendor of CryEngine 2, but it's a rare successful case of addition by subtraction. The subtraction in this case is the poor coding that hampered Crysis framerates for years. CryEngine 3 is now a multiplatform engine, and 2011 brought us a multiplatform release of Crysis 2 and even a console port of the original Crysis in the revamped engine. It's clear that the new engine is still one of the most capable around, and with the engine fully licensable, we'd love to see more PC-centric developers hop onboard and once again push the power of PC hardware to the max.
Strengths: CryEngine 3 features some of the most technically proficient graphics around. It supports a number of high-end graphical features, including a real-time dynamic global illumination solution fully optimized for current-gen machines; a new real-time soft particle system affected by object collisions, forces such as wind and gravity, and lighting and shadows; volumetric light beams; screen-space ambient occlusion support, a unique deferred shading solution and a high-level "platform-agnostic" shader scripting technology. In other words, it looks basically as good as CryEngine 2, but is far more scalable.
It may not have PC gamers hitting the upgrade button like the original Crysis but Crysis 2 still looks pretty damn good.
The “What You See is What You Play” Sandbox editor is one of the best developer tools around, offering instant feedback. CryEngine 3 also supports AI and game scripting by Lua or Flow-Graph system, integrated physics engine, and a full suite of performance analysis tools.
Weaknesses: Some view CryEngine 3's scalability and newfound console compatibility a step back for the high end features of the engine. While CryEngine 3 remains one of the most advanced high-end graphics engines around, Crysis 2 wasn't nearly the graphical step forward that Crysis 1 was. Of particular concern to enthusiasts is its tepid support of DX11 features (even after a post-release patch for Crysis 2) and stability issues.
Coming Soon: Mechwarrior Online, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2
Comments are closed on this article
sbsk2000
December 29, 2011 at 9:51pm
Very good article, though I kind of hoped for at least a mention of CD Projekt's RED Engine that powerd The Witcher 2. It was some of the more impressive displays of graphics tech I've seen this past year.
kixofmyg0t
December 24, 2011 at 11:11pm
The Radeon HD 3200 in my laptop(yup not much of a PC gamer. I still enjoy Red Alert 2 more than Battlefield 3) doesnt have enough muscle for any of these engines lol.
Maybe Source.....on low detail....maybe.
iceman08
December 27, 2011 at 8:32am
Similar boat. I want to game on PC, but I'm stuck with an old laptop. don't have the fund to build a rig. I did the canyourunit test, and I swear the website laughed at me for half the games i tested
JohnP
December 23, 2011 at 4:41pm
Terrific article! Thanks...
I noticed that 3D effects was not mentioned in relationship to any of the engines. Is that because there are so few examples or that the numbers are not there of people running 3D consistently on the PC or consoles?
FullArmageddon
December 23, 2011 at 10:05am
I'm excited to see what Kojima's new Fox Engine looks like when his new title is officially announced.
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
December 24, 2011 at 11:05am
First: Battlefield 3 is playable at 1920x180 and Ultra settings with a single GTX 580 or above. The processor doesn't matter at all, provided it has at least two cores. Extra video cards aren't needed, unless you're playing at giant resolutions. Does Nvidia pay you to write otherwise?
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/1
Second: Yeah, the Creation engine is a steaming pile of crap from a dozen dogs. How many years did it take before PC technology advanced enough to manage playable frame rates with Oblivion? Four? Five? I built a i7 with a GTX 580 and 12Gb of RAM--very modest by today's standards, but should absolutely crush a six-year old game. It doesn't. Sure, everything's maxed out, but it still stutters and sputters once in a while, whenever there's too much for the engine to handle, confined as it is to kiddie console design limitations.
bling581
December 27, 2011 at 11:19am
I have a single GTX 580 with only 4 GB of RAM (one stick died!) and I play BF3 and many other games on Ultra at 1920x1200 on a 30" flat screen. No lag or hiccups during gameplay at all.
stradric
December 23, 2011 at 6:48am
You mentioned Doom 4 in the coming soon for id Tech 5. I'm pretty sure that project has been put on hold by Bethesda after the poor showing from RAGE.
RAGE sucked, and I've sworn off id products because of it.
praetor_alpha
December 23, 2011 at 6:43am
Unreal 3 engine has been around forever and is in pretty much the default for everything. If I'm not mistaken, it debuted in 2006 with Gears of War. And yes, it's too easy to make everything look like everything's coated with vasoline.
I was wondering what Scaleform was, I saw it on my Skyrim box (thanks).
I still see BINK video show up in modern games. Sure it's designed for games, but it was also designed in the 90s! GPUs can now accelerate H264 and 1080p should not make a modern gaming machine break a sweat.
h e x e n
December 23, 2011 at 6:02am
If I built a game right now it would be with the Frostbite 2 engine, I'd just have to work for EA :p
I have a screenshot of something similar to your BF3 picture as my desktop background and have had more than one person think it's a real photo.
Absolutely beautiful engine.
Nimrod
December 23, 2011 at 4:12am
I thought the engine that ran S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looked pretty good when it wasnt crashing. It was the first to support DX 10.1 and was later one of the first to use DX11. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 ever comes out it will be multi-platform as well!
smashingpumpin
December 23, 2011 at 2:36am
Speaking of Game Engines, I'll just leave this here...
I sure hope they're working on AA4 with Cryengine 3 for the rest of us.
The Corrupted One
December 22, 2011 at 10:10pm
You forgot about Unity, (my favorite)
Unity 3D is freaking beast.
It deserves way more attention.
It's so easy to use, (it can work from Python!)
j814wong
December 22, 2011 at 9:12pm
Unigine also supports Linux, OSX, Windows, PS3, Android, and iOS. It's felxibiltiy is worht noting in terms of platform support so I think this should be mentioned.
+1 for Linux support!
noobstix
December 22, 2011 at 6:06pm
Gamebryo/Creation = Windows XP Home of game engines. Anything past 2 CPU cores and 2 GB of RAM is basically a waste of resources. You would think that only using such limited resources on a high-end machine (with a quad-core and at least 8 GB of RAM) would not stress it at all. Not only is the system still stressed, but the game can still look and run like shit. I feel kinda bad for Xbox and PS3 players who run into major bugs and stuff because they have to keep reloading previous saved games and try not to do anything to trigger the errors while PC gamers can just "console" their way past it (unless the game ends up freezing or CTD).
Everything else on that list is pretty good. If anything, I would say the graphical glitches in the Unreal Engine 3 are pretty prominent in Bioware games. At times, Mass Effect can look like a garbled mess of high-res and low-res textures. I think Dragon Age Origins might've fried my GPU (though I still blame the manufacturer for the quality). For the Crytek engine, I used to only be able to run Crysis 1 on Medium (AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ w/ Diamond Radeon HD 3650) for "playable" framerates. Now I can bump it up to Ultra while still retaining those "acceptable" framerates. My only experience with the Frostbite 2 engine was during the BF3 Beta so I can only say that it looks and runs like the Crytek engine on my current rig.
Jeffredo
December 30, 2011 at 10:45am
You're right, Gamebryo is a dinosaur that needs to be put down. I would hope Skyrim is the last game Bethesda uses it for, but I bet the "Creation" engine shows up in Fallout IV as well.
JCGPZ9
December 23, 2011 at 1:00am
I was wondering the same. Dirt 3 looked great, even on older hardware. F1 2011 took it even further by showing the little movements here or there on the F1 cars. At least the engine will see use beyond racing games.
DanScharff
December 22, 2011 at 5:40pm
Actually, I was going for ballyhooed. Still, thanks for pointing it out.
As for which engines made the cut, there are plenty of interesting engines out there, but we tried to focus mostly on high profile engines that either have been or will be used by multiple developers and/or multiple games.
jadei
December 22, 2011 at 5:01pm
You missed the best engine of all. The Avalanche engine used in Just Cause 2.
Biceps
December 22, 2011 at 5:14pm
+1 The huge view distances, the easy use and setup of NVidia 3D Vision, the great graphics and the relative absence of bugs are all things that made this one of my favorite games of 2011.
niemivh
December 22, 2011 at 4:55pm
Articles like this are why I keep coming back to MaxPC. Information presently fairly is interesting. Inflammatory headline grabbing, by feeding chum to the reactionary elements of the web community is not interesting. Keep more articles like this coming!
rook
December 22, 2011 at 4:18pm
What makes you think id tech 5 is a top game engine? Call it Carmack's Wasted Effort.
