Frostbite 3 vs CryEngine 3

[Stringjam]

I think both engines are very capable at producing some great environments.

If what we're talking about here is the quality of assets we see in the two games that showcase them (BF4 and Crysis3), then there is really no comparison -- Crytek takes it hands down.

How many scenes in BF4 look anything like this?

But that doesn't answer the question about the engines. You would need to build the same environment in each engine to ever figure that one out.

I have to LOL though at the belief that Cryengine can't do big MP. Apparently nobody else out there played 64-player PowerStruggle in Crysis Wars, which had some huge maps, and some ridiculously huge maps once the community got involved.

I think BF4 is pretty impressive, though, from the MP standpoint. It's a real trip, and it looks fantastic....I would say better than any MP to date. Paracel Storm is one of the coolest MP maps I've ever played.

I have a feeling this poll will be more about the games and less about the engines, though.

One of the best things about Cryengine; you can go over to CryDev and download the SDK and play with the real thing yourself. You'll never be able to do that with Frostbite.

 

[futurefields]

CryEngine.

People don't appreciate the little things Crytek do in their games. Like when you pick up a weapon, it doesn't magically appear in your inventory. Your character actually reaches down and picks it up with his hands, and you can see your feet, your characters shadow etc. Really adds to the immersion and helps put you in the environment.

 

[BrightCandle]

I think I am not qualified to say much on the issue, having programmed with neither engine I don't know the strengths or weaknesses and I don't know how much of what we see in the games using these engines is due to art or engine. What I do know is that if I want to play with crytek engine I can do, it has a modder friendly licence that allows people to learn the engine without spending 1 million dollars on buying rights to use it. The same as far as I know is not true with Frostbite, I think frostbite is limited to EA and no one else can use it. So right there is one advantage from an enthusiast point of view of Crytek's approach to potential games developers.

 

[MeldarthX]

Both are damn good engines; without a doubt. Some things FB3 handles better than CE3; that would be multiplayer - its not a huge difference but its there.

Same thing with single player; CE3 assets seem to be a bit better than BF3's engine; though honestly we really haven't seem either engine seriously tapped yet.

Why isn't there a pole for both? I like both - I'm looking forward to blowing up buildings in FB3 engine That is one thing that both handle well; but think FB3 handles a little better once the bugs are ironed out.....

 

[UaVaj]

I think I am not qualified to say much on the issue, having programmed with neither engine I don't know the strengths or weaknesses and I don't know how much of what we see in the games using these engines is due to art or engine. What I do know is that if I want to play with crytek engine I can do, it has a modder friendly licence that allows people to learn the engine without spending 1 million dollars on buying rights to use it. The same as far as I know is not true with Frostbite, I think frostbite is limited to EA and no one else can use it. So right there is one advantage from an enthusiast point of view of Crytek's approach to potential games developers.

good point.

however based solely on what is seen in game when graphical detailed is maxed out. cryengine3 offers more eye candy.

 

[Jodell88]

Can you really decide which engine is better based upon one game from each?

This!

You can have the best game engine in the world and games can still look and run like crap if the game developers are crap.

This comparison is as worthless as DirectX vs OpenGL.

 

[Fenixgoon]

i'm going to vote CE3.

crysis 3 maxed out? ran beautifully.
BF4 beta? ran like crap on medium.

i know i'm CPU-bound for BF4, but the question is why does Crysis3 run so well and BF4 doesn't?

and honestly, i can't say i see a massive difference between BF3 and BF4, and BF3 runs like butter. of course it would be helpful to play side by side or take screens of each.

 

[HeXen]

CryEngine.

People don't appreciate the little things Crytek do in their games. Like when you pick up a weapon, it doesn't magically appear in your inventory. Your character actually reaches down and picks it up with his hands, and you can see your feet, your characters shadow etc. Really adds to the immersion and helps put you in the environment.

That's just game design. It's a direction they took, Farcry 2 and 3 with the Dunia engine does the same things, actually moreso. It's not a limitation of any engine to do that. BF4 doesn't do that for the obvious reason that it's competitive online play but they may have had other reasons as well.

Cryengine of course since the beginning was built to beable to produce lots of foliage and they do it well and most everything is in real time since Cryengine 2. Their engine is easy to work with and the ability to drop into game and back out from within is great for devs and looks like Epic copied a lot of their ideas in making UE4 which I believe will be the most used engine for the next 5 years.

Most of the other Cryengine based games like Sniper Elite or whatever do not feature very many of the engine's features, their mostly static environments but look great in screenshots. Aion was Cryengine 2 and it looks wierd, Nexuiz remake is Cryengine 3 and it's static of course...shame no one else does much with it unlike Unreal engines where most every dev pushes it to the max.

 

[Fire&Blood]

That's Crytek's biggest problem, studios big/good enough to really push the engine are probably using something else already. Other than Crysis, nothing else was putting the spotlight on their engine and even Crytek itself dropped the ball with Warface which looks mediocre. They decided to drop the numerical in engine name, not sure what good it will do. The engine is definitely cutting edge, check out the clip especially the part towards the end when they demo procedural GPGPU weather:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF1zjDSqPoo

 

[uclaLabrat]

i'm going to vote CE3.

crysis 3 maxed out? ran beautifully.
BF4 beta? ran like crap on medium.

i know i'm CPU-bound for BF4, but the question is why does Crysis3 run so well and BF4 doesn't?

and honestly, i can't say i see a massive difference between BF3 and BF4, and BF3 runs like butter. of course it would be helpful to play side by side or take screens of each.

Not sure I understood you correctly...did you just compare a post-launch game to a beta as evidence that one is better than the other?

 

[blackwhiskers]

Popularity of CryEngine is itself a weird problem, and from what I hear, it's mostly because getting a license to work with the engine is a rather foggy and mystical process, where it's unclear who decides what gives and why. Compare this to Unreal Engine, where getting a license is no problem, you can easily start with your indie game by using the free udk, and going from there is really easy, if you have the means.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Not sure I understood you correctly...did you just compare a post-launch game to a beta as evidence that one is better than the other?

well, there aren't any other games i've played with Frostbite3, so that's all i've got as a point of reference.

and i've played plenty of betas that ran just fine.

 

[IEC]

CryEngine is superior in most respects, and you can actually make other games using it (see: MW-LL, MwO, Star Citizen, etc.)

CryEngine actually has a decent SDK...

 

[uclaLabrat]

well, there aren't any other games i've played with Frostbite3, so that's all i've got as a point of reference.

and i've played plenty of betas that ran just fine.

And the BF beta ran just fine as well...aside from server crashes (which are a perennial DICE feature on rollout) BF4 runs like butter. I've never really played any crysis game, so I don't have a fair basis for comparison, but from screen shots I've seen it seems like Cryengine games have much better high res textures, but I think gameplay is probably better with FB3.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Cryengine. Frostbite hides so much crap under tons of special effects.

Everything in frostbite is like under 30 layers of special effect processing and filters.

 

[uclaLabrat]

Cryengine.

Everything in frostbite is like under 30 layers of special effect processing and filters.

Que? Whachu be talking bout, willis?

 

[HeXen]

*Throws in the Red engine 3*...Go!

 

[Carfax83]

*Throws in the Red engine 3*...Go!

Red Engine 3 is tailor made specifically for heavy RPGs like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk etcetera so it probably lacks the flexibility of the other engines...

I think the Unreal Engine 4 is going to dominate this new cycle. Rumor has it that it can use up to 16 threads..

 

[Childs]

CryEngine is superior in most respects, and you can actually make other games using it (see: MW-LL, MwO, Star Citizen, etc.)

CryEngine actually has a decent SDK...

There are other games made with Frostbite, MoH, NFS, Army of Two, as well as the next Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Battlefront. Because its owned by EA its being used internally as opposed to licensing it out to anyone, but that shouldn't be considered a negative for the purposes of this discussion.

Anyways, I think Frostbite is more practical. The performance of Cryengine on modern systems is OK, but most people can't play it in all its glory. I think the art is better in Crytech games, but thats more of a preference and not a technical limitation of most engines.

Its too bad the Offset Engine will really never see the light of day. That looked like it would have held up even today.

 

[HeXen]

Red Engine 3 is tailor made specifically for heavy RPGs like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk etcetera so it probably lacks the flexibility of the other engines...

I think the Unreal Engine 4 is going to dominate this new cycle. Rumor has it that it can use up to 16 threads..

Rybka 3, Shredder 10 chess engines can use 256 threads
Threads are a number that doesn't necessarily gurantee anything. I just look at what an engine is capable of doing graphically for the hardware it's doing it on. Flexability is all about what a developer wants to do with it and make the appropriate additions or changes. NFS team had to make changes to Frostbite 3 so they could be useful as a racer for the new NFS game. Just an example.

 

[Fa11acy]

obviously they are both state of the art, but I hear many complain about how they are mainly geared towards consoles and are therefore not optimized very well for pc.

 

[HeXen]

obviously they are both state of the art, but I hear many complain about how they are mainly geared towards consoles and are therefore not optimized very well for pc.

PC elitists think every game is not optimized for the PC. For some reason they think their $600 card that is so fresh off the assembly line that the solder hasn't even cooled yet, should run BF4 and every game for the next 5 years at 120fps because the numbers in the specs tell them so by comparison. I keep telling everyone for years that specs are just numbers. It takes a lot of digits on that paper to make a real difference in the game that a gamer can really see and feel without using benchmarks and side by side screenshots with an electron magnifier.
Things like Mantle and streamlined Linux will certainly help, but it's never going to be any more optimized for the very nature of the PC infrastructure. If you want the best then you have to financially keep up with the best along with every niche software trend and ini tweak to boot. That's why someone decided to make a console kids.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Lets revisit this when we have some UE4 titles shall we?

I believe UE4 will outclass both FB3 and CE3.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Lets revisit this when we have some UE4 titles shall we?

I believe UE4 will outclass both FB3 and CE3.

I honestly think CE3 is leaps beyond both; it's just that no games are really pushing it.

I think Star Citizen is going to turn some heads.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I honestly think CE3 is leaps beyond both; it's just that no games are really pushing it.

I think Star Citizen is going to turn some heads.

No games use UE4 and the tech demos epic has shown are better than anything crytek has done to date.