This is what gamers have been waiting for! This is what they meant when they said: Next Gen. Truly next gen. These screens from Siggraph 2009 showing off id Tech 5’s impressive engine shows just how real the unreal can be. What makes me more impressed with these shots is the actual environments (similar to environments I have tried to model and sculpt in ZBrush myself) and the lighting are just so perfectly pleasing to the eyes, it’s like visual candy heroin. If that makes sense at all. What I am really trying to say is, let’s fricken’ Rage!!
I was going through this PDF from Siggraph and was hoping to explain some of the “jargon” to you but this is so far over my artistically-minded brain, there is just no point. I’ll provide a link so you can check it out but it’s far and away programmers techy-geek speak, which is hard for me to follow. (Hard for a lot of people I’m sure) My mind just doesn’t work that way and well, this engine is definitely the most advanced I have seen in my opinion, more so than Unreal 3 (which I am not a big fan of). There are probably few people that even understand what id Software Senior Programmer JMP van Waveren explains here, but it’s still cool to look at and try to figure out, how the hell did they do this?
As an aspiring Environment Artist, this is some great inspiration for me and others interested in the same career path and that’s my main reason for posting this today. So very much impressed with these shots and the way id Software goes about their Virtual Texturing pipeline. If you don’t get impressed by this, you probably don’t get impressed by anything.
id Tech 5 Challenges: From Texture Virtualization to Massive Parallelization
The Gamer Report 