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Engine and Render Programmers from the Snowdrop team discussed the release of next-gen consoles and its influence on game engines and technical features, including Snowdrop.
Ubisoft team shared its viewpoint on the technology next-gen consoles and how it defined the updates Snowdrop, a game engine used by all Ubisoft studios. Oleksandr Koshlo, Senior Render Programmer, and Christian Seger, Lead Engine Programmer on Snowdrop, discussed next-gen and its meaning in the community, talked about the way next-gen consoles influence the goals of the engine team, and how Snowdrop meets new technical changes.
The key update in the next-gen consoles is ray-tracing, and in lighting workflow, Snowdrop has a feature of real-time ray-tracing and software-based ray-tracing based on the GPU.
“There’s a lot of coding work to make it really fast in real-time graphics when you need to have 30 or 60 frames per second, but that’s where we’re going. It’s also something that Snowdrop lets you turn on and off. For example, you can have ray tracing on the next-gen consoles but turn it off on lower-end PCs if it’s too demanding.”
Christian Seger
The shift to SSD storage in consoles has made a bigger impact on the loading speed and data optimization. New consoles also support mesh shading that allows to split the object into pieces and skip those that the player doesn’t see during gameplay hence there are fewer details to render. Such a feature as well as supporting other new rendering methods in Snowdrop is still in development.
Read the full article on next-gen consoles and Snowdrop updates on the Ubisoft website. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, latest news, awesome artworks, and more.