Geometry Instancing: See the Difference!

Despite of hardcore requirements, FarCry still uses a number of simplifications in order to deliver higher performance to customers. For instance, some distant vegetation uses 2D sprites instead of geometry for boosting speed. There is a way to re-enable “full geometry” in the game, but once activated, you are going to get a “slide-show” speed even on the most powerful graphics cards and microprocessors. To provide astonishing geometry amid low performance penalty game developers are advised to use geometry instancing for similar objects.

Currently, games face limits on the number of unique objects they can display in the scene, not because of graphics horsepower, but often the CPU-side overhead of either storing or submitting many slightly different variations of the same object. With geometry instancing, the VPU can create multiple objects from a single geometric model. Rather than passing an entire new model for each on-screen item, the application can send one model, and then supply parameters which indicate how each instance of that model is to be rendered in the scene. This results in savings on the CPU side.

FarCry v1.2, sprites vs. geometry on distant objects
Sprites distant ratio 1	Sprites distant ratio 50
Sprites distant ratio 100	Sprites distant ratio 100, shader model 2.0b

While it was reported earlier that geometry instancing is a prerogative of the Shader Model 3.0, in fact, it is not. Shader Model 3.0 requires geometry instancing to be supported, but it appears that RADEON X800-series along with some other RADEON graphics processors sport geometry instancing as well, ATI claims.

Geometry instancing alone, as our previous FarCry benchmark session revealed, does not bring any huge performance benefit to FarCry. However, once we enable the “eye-candy” geometry from the console and get a bit more realistic plants, we will not be able to play because of poor performance unless we enable geometry instancing (via Shader Model 3.0 or Shader Model 2.0b render paths) that brings the speed dramatically up.

FarCry to Get HDR Lighting, 3Dc, etc…

At this point Crytek, the developer of FarCry, is implementing capabilities of the modern graphics processors into its engine and title in an attempt to increase the speed of the game. But in future the company will add some graphics features in order to bring more realism into FarCry and impress gamers once again.

Among the features that are going to be implemented shortly are high dynamic range (HDR) lighting as well as 3Dc technology. The former will add some cool lighting effects into the game, while the latter will enable more detailed objects.

Both ATI and NVIDIA promise that the enhancements will see the light of the day with the 1.3 patch, but it is absolutely not clear when this patch is planned to emerge, as the latest official 1.2 patch was withdrawn by Crytek citing its unexpected behaviour.