Silvan Hau first appeared in the Inside Star Citizen: Further Underground video. He presented his team’s work on the Gen12 rendering engine, and the encouraging results they are seeing today.
An intervention on Spectrum allowed him to give more details about the current status of the engine and some features.
Silvan begins by recalling that the first lines of code for Gen12 arrived in 3.14. They only supported post-processing effects.
The last implementation (in 3.17) allows the first geometric renderings via Gen12 with static geometry. However, it remains to support transparent geometry among others.
In 3.18, the entire geometry of a scene will be rendered under Gen12. Rendering not directly including the scene (pipeline centric: rendered images that are not directly intended to be displayed on the screen such as cubemaps, Render To Texture, etc.) is also ready to be fully executed by Gen12.
With the next patch, the rendering itself will be entirely done with the new engine. This should represent the biggest performance gain related to Gen12, however, Silvan cannot yet inform on the real impact of these improvements, since they have not yet done any tests in real conditions.
Some rendering passes still need to be ported to Gen12:
- GPUSkinning
- lens flares
- Damagemap rendering
A long process of engine stabilization will follow. When this is done, they will have all the green lights to finalize the implementation of Vulkan, but not before.
Silvan then answers a question about customizing graphics options like Lensflares (enable/disable). The team is hesitant to offer these options for two main reasons:
- They want to provide a consistent experience from player to player.
- More options complicate the engine, and that’s not a priority until Gen12 is fully functional.
Until the engine is complete, they won’t make any decisions about graphics options.