It’s impossible to have a gaming-related conversation with anyone at the moment without Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3 cropping up. The two games are no doubt the hottest releases of the year, and their intense rivalry only serves to fuel the excitement.
As both camps try to add gold stars to their columns, Battlefield 3 has received a nice nod from Nvidia Community Manager Kris Rey. In a recent interview with DICE’s Patrick Liu at PAX, Kris opened the interview with a statement rather than a question, saying, “Battlefield 3 looks amazing. It’s one of the best looking games ever.”
Since Nvidia had tossed them an incredibly large gone, Liu shared some details on the differences the improved engine has made and how they’re able to use that to achieve their full graphical potential.
“We’ve developed Frostbite 2 now since Frostbite 1. We added a ton of stuff. We basically rewrote a lot of the rendering from scratch. We added different rendering. Real time radiosity on the PC, it produces amazing in-door 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.”
Kris Rey added himself that he had been extremely impressed with the use of volumetric smoke in the game, as well as fog.
There is no doubt Battlefield 3 is stunning on the PC, but how this will translate to consoles remains to be seen, as well as if it will tempt any Modern Warfare 3 faithfuls to cross over from the dark side. Battlefield 3 placed a lot of emphasis on graphics from the start, while they promised console performance of only 30fps, Modern Warfare 2 has promised a constant 60fps, no doubt at the cost of some more rich graphics.
