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While most of the heavy graphical lifting is relegated to full engines like the six we've already covered, more and more specialized processing and rendering is being offloaded to a variety of middleware utilities. Middleware is a broad term, and these mini-engines specialize in just about everything, from tree creation, to audio utilities, to physics modeling, to video compression. Here's a sampling of some of the most used middleware solutions used in game development.
You might think virtual foliage creation tech is about as boring as watching virtual grass grow, but hey, trees are important. The nearly ubiquitous SpeedTree is a vegetation programming and modeling software that quickly generates a variety of semi-randomized foliage in real time. There’s also a SpeedTree Cinema version for higher resolution tree render libraries for use in feature films, including such titles as Avatar.
The Havok Physics system has gone from a physics middleware to practically an engine unto itself. First released at GDC in 2000, it was bought in September 2007 by Intel, and was honored in 2008 at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the development of physics engines in electronic entertainment. The Havok suite offers a full variety of separate processing modules, including Havok Physics, Havok Animation, Havok Behavior, Havok Cloth (soft body dynamics), Havok Destruction (rigid body environments), and Havok AI.
These physics and animation libraries are easily added to an existing engine. For example, Skyrim makes use of its own Creation Engine, but also takes advantage of Havok Physics, Animation, and Behavior libraries. Source's integrated physics engine is also based on modified Havok engine code.
Nvidia's proprietary physics middleware solution, the main appeal of PhysX is its ability to offload complex physics processing tasks to the GPU. Of course, as an Nvidia technology, it's only available on Nvidia cards, though there is some software implementation of PhysX on consoles and some earlier PhysX titles.
PhysX provides impressive collision modeling for both hard bodies (terrain, debris, etc.) and soft bodies (cloth, hair, flesh). Proponents of the tech laud the improved realism and atmosphere, but naysayers question the dedicated hardware and processing power devoted to what's essentially an improved garbage and debris engine.
Another seemingly dry middleware, Scaleform does exactly what it says on the tin. A vector graphics rendering engine, Scaleform scales user interfaces, HUDs, and animated textures. This allows professional UI developers to design textual and graphical overlay elements in Adobe Flash and other native vector forms, and have them be scaled and fully interactive in games. So every time you see a game menu system that looks like it was ported over from an ill-conceived flash webgame, keep in mind that with Scaleform, that's actually a legitimate possibility. Scaleform is one of the most widely used middeware tools, and is also natively integrated into Unreal Engine 3 and Gamebryo.
One of the oldest legacy middleware apps, Bink Video is a proprietary video file format (.bik). Developed by RAD Game Tools, .biks are lightweight video files primarily used for full-motion video sequences in video games. Though not a low-quality algorithm by nature, unfortunately .biks are often highly compressed, mainly implemented in order to fit cinematics onto physical media. With digital distribution and larger optical media gaining favor, Bink has been in decline on PCs in recent years, but is still a major presence on mobile games.
A middleware game renderer best known for its benchmarking capabilities, Unigine is actually secretly a full-on game engine in its own right. Unigine's claim to fame is its support of the most up-to-date API hooks and graphics tech available, supporting DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, and up to Shader Model 5.0. Its best known benchmarking tool, the Unigine Heaven DX11 benchmark also supports Nvidia 3D Vision and ATI Eyefinity.
Only 6,385 triangles? We demand our dragons have at least 10 thousand!
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.
