Wolfenstein 2 tech details: +30k drawcalls & up to +6 million triangles per frame, volumetric fog, tessellated water surface and more


id Software’s Lead Renderer Programmer, Tiago Sousa, has shared some interesting tech details about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. According to Sousa, Wolfenstein 2 sports almost 30X more drawcalls than DOOM, something that could explain why this game is a bit more demanding that it.

Going into more tech details, Wolfenstein 2 +30k drawcalls and up to +6 million triangles per frame. According to Sousa, that’s almost half a billion tris/2 million drawcalls per second.

In Wolfenstein 2, all “fog” is volumetric and unified. Moreover, every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering.

Furthermore, water surface is “tessellated” on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface.

As Sousa noted, this was mainly achieved thanks to the Vulkan API. Sousa concluded that while there is still room for improvement, Wolfenstein 2 currently runs 2X faster than most other games while doing much more under its hood.