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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 DirectX 11 Details

PCG Hardware interviewed Anders Gyllenberg of DICE talking about the Frostbite engine and support for DirectX 11 features used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Here's an excerpt:


PCGH: Are there any differences between the Console and the PC Version as far as technical or visual aspects are concerned (we know, BC2 is running with 720p and no AA on consoles)?

Anders Gyllenberg: We have added several PC specific features. Changing resolution & changing the graphical fidelity are the two obvious ones. We also have proper support for multiple aspect ratios like 4:3 and 16:10. The player has the option of activating the advanced control panel where you can set several settings such as detail levels, the AA, MSAA and HBAO. We support Dx9, Dx10 & Dx11.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - New pictures of the DX 11 game. (9)

PCGH: We also know that Bad Company 2 is featured by Frostbite Engine 1.x. Can you tell us the technical highlights of Frostbite Engine (for example SSAO, Depth of Field, Deferred Lighting or Global Illumination)? If yes can you please give examples how this rendering techniques are utilized in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DoF while aiming for example)?

Anders Gyllenberg: The base renderer is a forward renderer. Some feature highlights would be an advanced SSAO technique called HBAO (Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion), DOF during cutscenes, particle systems optimized for huge amounts of particles, soft particle blending, and soft shadowmap filtering (DX11 only).

PCGH: Can you confirm that the PC version utilizes DirectX 11 (at GDC 2009, Johan Andersson showed some cool rendering features)? If yes, what were the deciding technical advantages of the DX11 API? In what way does it allow you to optimize or simplify the rendering process (we’ve heard you’re using Direct Compute for deferred shading)?

Anders Gyllenberg: Yes we can confirm that we support Dx11. The main benefits for us are efficient soft shadowmap filtering, and some smaller performance optimizations.

PCGH: Developing for Console (and PC) usually requires an engine that is strongly multithreaded. What different calculations can be or are split up into different threads/worker jobs and what is the expected performance gain resulting from two respectively four (or more) cores? You are using DX11-Multithreading to lighten the load on the CPU?

Anders Gyllenberg: Most of the CPU processing is parallelized – culling, rendering, physics, audio, animations, collision etc. Performance increases noticeably with a quad core. We are currently not using DX11-multithreading.

Izvor:guru3d