Star Citizen Live: Engine & Graphics Q&A


In this episode of Star Citizen Live, Jared Huckaby meets with members of the Star Citizen Graphics Engine team to answer questions from players.

Optimization: Gen 12 vs. Vulkan

Gen12 is the rendering architecture of Star Citizen, that is to say the process which makes it possible to send to the screen of the player the pixels corresponding to what the character sees. This is an internal development at CIG whose sole objective is improve performance because the process used before is not suitable for the scope of the project Star Citizen.

Vulkan is a graphical API that interfaces software (including games) with different hardware. Vulkan is the replacement for DirectX and is not developed by CIG. Vulkan therefore allows developers to write their code without worrying about different configurations PCs, while taking advantage of the latest technologies.

Gen12 consists of two parts: rendering the scene and post processing. Rendering the scene is the most complex part to achieve because there are thousands of elements (shadersmaterials…) to be converted.

The first stages of deployment of Gen12, which can be found in patch 3.17, concern the rendering of the scene with the brushes (static objects). The next steps will be characters, ships and planets. At that time, Gen12 will be almost fully functional. It will remain a big task overcome with transparent objects.

Performance gains and graphical improvements

Vulkan and Gen12 should contribute to significantly improve game performance, which would give room to improve the graphic quality of it. Some players fear that the gains obtained by these technologies will be immediately used by the developers to introduce other technologies, which would make the game more beautiful but not smoother. The developers want to be reassuring on this point: improving performance is a goal for CIG.

In fact, the deployment of Vulkan and Gen12 poses solid foundations for improved graphics and performance. Indeed, some recent technologies could not be easily introduced into the current engine. In the future, CIG developers will therefore be able to take advantage more easily of the latest advances in terms of rendering and effects.

The developers already have a optimization roadmap to be done once Gen12 is fully operational.

Improved performance on old configurations

Performance gains with Gen12 depend on player configuration. Depending on whether the bottleneck is the CPU or the GPU, the player will or will not see an improvement.

Patch 3.17 and performance

Due to the coexistence of the two rendering processes – Gen12 for brushes and the old for the rest – there is an additional cost that can lead to a drop in performance on certain configurations.

During the passage of the patch on the test servers, some players noticed performance gains and talked about it on Spectrum. This is what led the developers to explain the partial deployment of Gen12. Initially, they weren’t planning to do this until they had measured the evolution of performance, and in any case, they knew that there would not be gains for all configurations.

linux

While DirectX is only designed for Windows, Vulkan works on other systems like Linux or even Apple. The transition to Vulkan therefore simplifies the port to Linux.

CIG management wants a Linux version.

DLSS and FSR technologies

These technologies upscaling allow to have very high resolutions at the cost of some artifacts. Developers will integrate these technologies in the futureonce converted to Gen12 and Vulkan.

High Dynamic Range

Using a wide range of colors is a goal, but it’s a lot of work that isn’t currently a priority.

Night vision

The graphics engine developers have ideas on how to technically implement night vision, but they are waiting for some direction on what the night vision in the future.

Large-scale fights

As far as rendering goes, as it stands, the CPU would be the bottleneck. However, rendering is not the only resource consumer: simulation, physics, lighting… will also use the processor.

The developers plan to use techniques to reduce graphics quality in large fights to maintain performance at an acceptable level.

Building interiors

CIG developers are experimenting with a technology to replace (opaque) window textures with a 3D effect that gives the illusion of seeing the room behind it.

This should give more life and realism to urban scenes.

Shadows generated by ship lights

Technically, the engine can already do this, however, the performance cost is not controlled and depends on the situation. An option could be offered to the player so that he can define the level of dynamic lighting that he wishes.

External cameras for ships

Rendering a second viewpoint on a single machine is a technical difficulty for all games because graphics cards are optimized to display a single point of view.

A camera with a simplified view, low resolution or radar imagerywould make it possible to have the functionality at a lower cost.

Ultrawide screens

This is a question for UI artists.

Graphics cards with lots of VRAM

The developers want to bring optimizations and user options for those playing on graphics cards with large amounts of VRAM.

One of the avenues envisaged is to allow download game with high resolution textures ; the problem being that the space on the hard disk would be greatly increased.

Direct storage

CIG has already set up internal technology to speed up the loading of textures into the GPU. So they don’t know if using Direct storage would noticeably improve performance or not. They will investigate.

Display distance

With Gen12 and Vulkan, developers could increase viewing distance and therefore reduce the sudden appearance of objects at a certain distance. There are discussions with the team in charge of creating the planets to optimize the consideration of objects on the surface of the planets (rocks, trees, etc.).

Next steps

In the short term, the developers on this team want to complete the transition to Gen12 and Vulkan.





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