Kingdom Come: Deliverance Voxel-Based Global Illumination

Kingdom Come: Deliverance Voxel-Based Global Illumination

 

Have a look at Kingdom Come: Deliverance using Cryengine’s new Voxel-Based Global Illumination feature, which offers an amazing visual impact for a mere 6% performance loss. 

With this feature enabled the game clearly looks much more realistic and gives a scene a lot more depth and more realistic shadows. 

 

    

 

Below is some information on this feature from Crytek, giving us some information on the performance impact of this feature and how it works. You can find more information on Voxel-Based Global Illumination here.  

 

      This GI solution is based on voxel ray tracing and provides following effects:

• – Dynamic indirect light bounce from static and most of dynamic objects.
• – Large scale AO and indirect shadows from static geometry (vegetation, brushes and terrain).
• – Works without pre-baking and does not require manual setup of many bounce lights or light volumes.

 

• First we prepare voxel representation of the scene geometry (at run-time, on CPU, asynchronously and incrementally).
• Every frame on GPU we trace thousands of rays through the voxels (and shadow maps) in order to gather occlusion and in-directional lighting.

 

The performance depends on which GI settings are used. Usually on Xbox One it takes 4-5 ms of GPU time and on good PC (GTX 780) it takes 2-3 ms (AO + Sun bounce, no point lights, low-spec mode). The fastest configuration is “AO only” mode, it provides large scale AO for the cost of about 2.5 ms on Xbox One.

 

   

 

Below is a video showcasing the visual difference when using this feature in a recent build of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which is said to have an impact of 3FPS, 6% by the YouTuber, who is using an AMD R9 Series GPU.  

Hopefully this means that this new feature works equally well on both AMD and Nvidia as we have first seen Voxel based illumination from Nvidia and the impact, according to this YouTuber is very low on AMD. Hopefully we will be seeing more of this feature in future games. 

 

 

Right now this feature is very new in Cryengine and is currently listed as experimental, but with such a low performance impact and such a great visual improvement I think it is likely that we will see similar features being implemented into a lot of future games. 

 

You can join the discussion on Voxel Based Global Illumination on Kingdom Come Deliverance on the OC3D Forums.