Ryse: Son Of Rome : ALL THE PIXELS

Being in the graphics research business, I’m still a sucker for a good-looking, show-off game, so I bought Ryse: Son Of Rome on PC. It was a launch title for the Xbox One, and was one of the first game in which Crytek went full-on Physically Based Rendering. There are a lot of good papers and presentations about it on the Crytek site. ‘

Check this PDF out for a good overview. When it comes to Global Illumination techniques, I believe they use the Crysis-style Light Propagation Volumes as described in this PPT presentation. Rendering is deferred, except for things which really need forward rendering like hair. This is the layout of the Gbuffer:

rysegbuffer

The game itself is a fairly standard button-mashing fair, with a story that only exists to push the action into various locales (forest-y, city-ish, rain-ish) to show off the rendering process.

Still, it’s a great example what impressive real-time visuals you can achieve with good textures, a consistent lighting model and clever use of depth-of-field/blur post-processing.

Just a quick hint, though, if you’re experiencing sloppy performance even on a pretty good PC, there is a problem with CPU timers in some configurations. Open the system.cfg in the game’s main directory and find and add:

sys_localization_folder=Localization
sys_highrestimer = 1 (ADD THIS LINE)

This fixed micro-stutter issues on my system.