Kingdom Come: Deliverance teased with SVOGI effects, looks incredible

Crytek has been in the headlines for their work in VR, but Warhorse Studios used Kickstarter to get their CRYENGINE-powered Kingdom Come: Deliverance off the ground - with the developer showing off some new graphical prowess.

Warhorse Studios has shown off Kingdom Come: Deliverance with SVOGI, with the video above showing you the difference between the SVOGI being enabled, and disabled in the game. Crytek's implementation of SVOGI is quite good, with the developer providing some details on the voxel-based global illumination technology:

Overview

• This GI solution is based on voxel ray tracing and provides following effects:
• Dynamic indirect light bounce from static and most of dynamic objects.
• Large scale AO and indirect shadows from static geometry (vegetation, brushes and terrain).
• Works without pre-baking and does not require manual setup of many bounce lights or light volumes.

How It Works

• First we prepare voxel representation of the scene geometry (at run-time, on CPU, asynchronously and incrementally).
• Every frame on GPU we trace thousands of rays through the voxels (and shadow maps) in order to gather occlusion and in-directional lighting.
• Note: Current default configuration provides only diffuse GI, for specular we still need light probes. System may be used as AO add-on to light probes or may completely replace diffuse contribution of light probes.

Current Limitations

• Large scale AO and indirect shadows may be cast properly only by static geometry.
• GI is not working on some forward rendering components like particles or water.
• Some artifacts like ghosting, aliasing, light leaking and noise may be noticeable in some cases.
• Procedural vegetation and merged vegetation do not cast occlusion or secondary shadows.
• Clouds shadow does not affect sun light bounce.
• Mesh (CGF) streaming and object layers run-time activation are not supported yet, objects may be missing in voxelization.
• If camera was teleported to completely new location it may take up to few seconds until occlusion is working properly.
• Only objects and materials with enabled shadow map casting may produce proper bounced light.
• For dynamic objects indirect light bounce is working only in the areas near voxelized static geometry.
• Bounce light may have noticeable delay of 1-2 frames.
• r_Supersampling=2 makes GI look strange but setting Low spec mode 1 or 2 pretty much restores the look and speed.

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