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.
Couple Wolfenstein 2 statistics: +30k drawcalls per frame, up to +6 million triangles per frame. That's almost half a billion tris/2 million drawcalls per sec. pic.twitter.com/OK7kU22CIw
— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017
In Wolfenstein 2, all “fog” is volumetric and unified. Moreover, every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering.
Couple Wolfenstein 2 geeky details: All "fog" is volumetric and unified, every light + shadow + indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering.
— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017
Furthermore, water surface is “tessellated” on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface.
Couple Wolfenstein 2 geeky details v2: Water surface is "tessellated" on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface. Water geom also uses async compute jobs to async with itself ( which is kind of crazy ).
— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017
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.
You know, it runs more than 2x faster than every 99% of games in market while doing much more 🙂 But still room for improvement yes.
— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017
John Papadopoulos
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities.Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved - and still does - the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the "The Evolution of PC graphics cards." Contact: Email
