Getting straight down to business, Patrick spoke of Frostbite 2, the engine powering Battlefield 3’s fantastic visuals: “We added a ton of stuff – we basically rewrote the rendering engine from scratch to add real-time radiosity on the PC… it produces amazing indoor lighting… for the scale of the maps we implemented new streaming technology, so we make bigger maps than we have ever been able to before.”
Continuing with the tech, Kris quizzed Patrick about one of our favourite topics, DirectX 11. In addition to using effects such as displacement mapping Patrick told us that Battlefield 3 will use Compute Shaders to improve the quality and effectiveness of the engine, and with regards to tessellation, which is “doing great on NVIDIA cards,” the DICE Producer simply says, “tessellation is so sexy!”
Kris then attempts to retrieve system spec information from Patrick, but as loose lips sink ships, and ruin PR plans, Patrick stays mum, though he is happy to say, “you’ll definitely be safe with dual [NVIDIA GTX] 580s in SLI.”