Print
The Skinny: Developed by Emergent Game Technologies (with builds by its various licensees); written in C++; commercially licensable as binary or source code.
You Know it From: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Creation Engine), Warhammer Online, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Civilization IV, Bully: Scholarship Edition, many more
The Lowdown: When most people think of Gamebryo, they think of Bethesda's particular open-world RPG take on the engine. But not only is Gamebryo not an RPG-focused engine, it's not even a Bethesda product. Developed by Numerical Design Limited and later Emergent Game Technologies, Gamebryo is a massive multi-platform development engine, featuring a wide array of genres on the PC, consoles, and mobile devices.
Built on NDL's NetImmerse engine, Gamebryo first launched in 2003. The engine was subsequently updated several times, and later iterations are known as Gamebryo Lightspeed. A highly modular engine, the source code for different builds of Gamebryo can vary wildly from project to project. EGT's latest core build, 2.6, supports all current console hardware and up to DirectX 10.
The familiar Bethesda flavor of Gamebryo is a result of extensive source code tinkering. The mangled script, sandbox shenanigans that we've all come to know and love from from Oblivion and the Fallout games are a result of a Frankensteinian stiching together of multiple seemingly incongruous moving parts. They've since completely overhauled and rewritten the engine for use in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, rebranding it the Creation Engine.
Strengths: Gamebryo's strength lies in its modular nature and access to its source code. The engine is interoperable with many middleware solutions, and the engine is well-equipped to handle complex scripting. This approach makes it ideal for building large, dynamic worlds.
On the Bethesda-specific branch of the Gamebryo evolutionary tree, its latest build, the Creation Engine, has been a major step forward for the graphical capabilities of Gamebryo. Skyrim's sweeping vistas, stunning sunsets, and dynamic encounters are a testament to the improved graphical fidelity of the engine. While somewhat cumbersome to tweak, manually editing values in the Skyrim's .ini file can show off the draw distance, particle effects, improved shadows and lighting, and special effects like bloom and radial blur that the engine can offer.
Weaknesses: Due to its modular access, Gamebryo games are essentially the sum of their parts…at best. With different middlewares, systems, codebases, and scripting languages, conflicts can and will occur, leading to both gameplay and stability bugs that can be hard to identify and remedy.
Bethesda's builds of the Gamebryo engine have many well-known issues. Scripting errors are frequent, leading to broken quests, animation loops, and other far more bizarre interactions that take place on a regular basis. Despite significant improvements, even the Creation Engine has no DirectX 11 features. Lack of an integrated advanced physics and interaction system leads to extensive problems with clipping and collisions.
Not to sound like a horse's ass or anything, but even with all the bells & whistles of Skyrim's Creation Engine, there's clearly room for improvement.
The most daming issues, however, are extensive stability issues in Bethesda's Gamebryo builds. Despite EGT being an industry leader in console-centric multi-core processing efficiency with its Floodgate tech, Gamebryo and Creation's support for multiple cores on the PC is virtually nonexistent. Bethesda's games have also been tragically prone to corrupted saves, crashes to desktop, and poor support for various graphics driver builds.
Coming Soon (speculative): Skyrim expansions (Creation Engine)
The Skinny: Developed by DICE/EA, 2011; EA proprietary engine, not licensable.
You Know it From: Battlefield 3, Need for Speed: The Run
The Lowdown: The latest and greatest from EA's in-house Swedish studio, Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), Frostbite 2 is the much ballyhooed engine behind Battlefield 3. With Frostbite 2, EA seems poised to expand DICE's powerful platform to beyond Battlefield, already using it in a Need For Speed title, and announcing plans to use Frostbite 2 in non-DICE games, something they didn't do with Frostbite 1 or 1.5.
Though a relative newcomer to the engine creation game, DICE's forward-thinking approach and fresher codebase provide Frostbite 2 with a feature-rich, non-dated architecture that can better take advantage of current and future-gen hardware.
Strengths: Built from the ground up to take care of high-end PC hardware, Frostbite 2 is far and away the most advanced graphical engine available at the moment. Frostbite 2 is perhaps the only engine to fully take advantage of both DX11 capabilities and 64-bit processing power, giving high end PCs a much deserved performance showpiece. The most impressive aspects of the engine are the volumetric effects, ambient occlusion, and light and shadow mapping. These powerful shader and rendering tools and effects create the most photorealistic screenshots to date, and even more impressive results in motion.
No smoke and mirrors here—ok, so there's some smoke, but Frostbite 2 powered Battlefield 3 really does look this good.
Though optimized for 64-bit architecture, Frostbite 2 is surprisingly scalable. Battlefield 3 is still a stunning looking game on relatively low settings—a modest PC can run the game smoothly on the Medium preset and still blow the console versions out of the water.
Weaknesses: Frostbite 2's main weakness is simply its lack of availability. As a proprietary EA engine, there are no plans to license the engine outside of EA internal studios. Though EA is taking steps to expand Frostbite 2's footprint in-house, there are still a relatively small number of titles expected to feature the engine. DICE has also been ambivalent about mod support for Battlefield 3, claiming the engine is too complex for the average amateur modding team. Compatibility wise, Frostbite 2 doesn't support DirectX 9 on PC, so no XP compatibility (though we consider the euthanizing of the aging OS a move in the right direction).
Frostbite 2 is also a key example of the law of diminishing returns. Getting solid framerates on BF3's High settings are easy, but the farther you push into Ultra territory the harder it is to maintain smooth performance. While not reaching Crysis 1 levels of inaccessibility, most gamers won't have the multi-GPU builds required to max out Frostbite 2's graphical capabilities.
Coming Soon (speculative): Mirror’s Edge 2, Dragon Age 3 multiplayer mode , Command & Conquer: Generals 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.
