RE Engine Will Evolve Into REX Engine, Says CAPCOM; Mesh Shader Assist Will Be Added

CAPCOM’s R&D YouTube channel posted a sequence of movies centered on the RE Engine. One among these seems to be into the previous and the way forward for the expertise.

The RE Engine was arguably instrumental in CAPCOM’s renaissance, delivering improved options equivalent to volumetric lighting, photogrammetry, extra correct physics simulations, and so on., whereas offering excessive efficiency and stability. The corporate began engaged on it in April 2014, releasing the primary recreation powered by the brand new engine in early 2017. Resident Evil VII: Biohazard turned a brand new leaf for CAPCOM, beginning a streak of profitable releases that lasted a few years, arguably till Exoprimal.

Practically all the video games launched on this timespan (with the notable exception of Monster Hunter World, which continues to be powered by the outdated MT Framework) have been made with RE Engine and have achieved vital essential and industrial success, propelling CAPCOM to record-breaking recreation gross sales and inventory pricing. This is the total record:

Nonetheless, CAPCOM is not resting on its laurels. For all its perks, even the RE Engine has its personal points. It wants to have the ability to deal with giant volumes of huge measurement property, and it additionally has to assist a excessive diploma of customization as video games of various genres are made with it. Furthermore, the engine is utilized by abroad contractors, requiring elevated work in documentation, samples, and localization.

That is why CAPCOM is now growing a brand new engine iteration known as REX or RE neXt ENGINE. The brand new REX expertise can be added to RE Engine in varied phases. Whereas we did not get a lot in the best way of specifics, the next elements have been proven in a slide:

• REDox
• REUI
• RELog
• REFlows
• REAssetStream
• REProfiler
• RELauncher
• RERuntime

In one other video posted on the R&D channel, CAPCOM went over a number of the future rendering strategies that can be added to RE Engine. The principle new rendering method is Mesh Shaders, one of many new options launched by DirectX 12 Final.

CAPCOM stated in-development video games will render backgrounds utilizing Mesh Shaders to scale back VRAM utilization by compressing and decompressing knowledge by meshlets. Customers with GPUs that don’t assist Mesh Shaders will not be left behind, anyway; CAPCOM has ready code that mimics their performance whereas working in vertex shaders.

It is one more trace that Mesh Shaders can be used extra in future video games after Alan Wake 2 famously dropped NVIDIA GTX 10 Sequence and AMD Radeon RX 5000 Sequence GPUs as a result of they do not assist the characteristic. In line with DSO Gaming, the sport truly runs on these outdated graphics playing cards, but it surely’s not even remotely playable.

CAPCOM will even introduce the Visibility Buffer characteristic to RE Engine, thus eliminating the necessity for double vertex processing. Vertex knowledge will also be restored through the Visibility Buffer, permitting totally different vertices and supplies to be executed in a single draw name so long as they’re in the identical shader. Between Mesh Shaders and Visibility Buffer, CAPCOM goals to significantly scale back CPU and GPU masses.