CryEngine 2 vs C4 Engine [Physics Test]

Features Comparasion:

Performance Test:

Basically there are two maps made for this test, one for Sandbox Editor 2 and another created for C4 (Build 145).

The versions where both very much the same, the only difference was that the map constructed in SandBox Editor 2 is large put with a small island with a couple of trees. The C4 version was a simple plain. In both versions there where exactly 768 spheres falling from the distance of roughly 10 meters

Here is a performance test I ran to find out which engine handles physics better.

C4 Engine Settings:

Crysis Settings (High):

Crysis Settings (Medium):

Crysis Settings – Other:

Even though CE2 has a worse frame rate C4 did better with higher settings such as the screen resolution, texture resolution and 4x FSAA.

This is how Crytek describe their physics engine;

“CryEngine 2 has powerful and optimized multithreaded physics system…” Crysis Interview

There are many videos on YouTube where people would go and create thousands of barrels and watch the explosions, the performance was great in the video because they used a screen capturing command to capture each frame while you are playing. Then later on he would create a video with all the frames using Virtual Dub (tutorial).

The actual frames where captured in real time that means that the CPU would suffer from the severe amount of physics, plus the CPU is dumping the frames. There is a command to move the physics calculations off the CPU onto the GPU. What do you know a much better framerate. The downside is that GPU’s are bad a performing physics because they have inferior collision detection than a CPU would have. Therefore with a huge scale physics video you have bouncy barrels and intersections between every single object.

I did not create this too promote any products. I just thought it would be an interesting test.

This article has been fixed on the 30th of September 2008.