Amazon Lumberyard Boosts Realism with Impressive Anti-aliasing

And it comes default

17

Amazon announced VR support for Lumberyard, their free of cost CryEngine-based game engine, at last year’s GDC, but this year the company is pushing the feature specs of the engine, maintaining that Lumberyard is the first game engine to directly integrate temporal anti-aliasing, specular anti-aliasing and order-independent transparency.

Showing off Lumberyard’s default chops at NVIDIA’s day-long off-site GDC event, we got a peek at just how good the world can look when all three filter/rendering techniques are flipped on in a complex, glass and reflection-heavy scene.

The demo spans a number of spaces, including an interior of a French bistrot filled with glasses and several light sources and an outside scene, a freshly soaked Parisian street that features a large amount of high frequency detail.

Amazon Lumberyard supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR—and it does it free of charge with no seat licenses, royalties, or subscriptions. The video below gives you a better look at all of the features announced at the NVIDIA event, although it’s missing expert commentary.

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. See here for more information.


Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Xron

    Looks good. Would be nice to see this level of detail in Vr, for some relaxing experiences.

  • kontis

    Looks like typical deferred shading shenanigans to me. Scale that to native 4K and your performance will tank even on 1080ti.

    • Raphael

      Why would you scale it to native 4k for vr?

  • Prithvi Boinpally

    This is simply lumberyard taking credit for cryteks work. Cryengine has had temporal and specular AA since crisis 3 (SMAAT2X). Order independent transparency is all that lumber yard added and now they claim that because all 3 are running simultaneously that they “are the first”

    • OgreTactics

      Well technically, this is based on CryEngine, and they are the first: at running the 3 technics simultaneously. The fact that it’s both already integrated with headsets and free, is all greenlight for me, except nobody uses CryEngine anymore.

      • Remstone

        Star Citizen just adopted this engine!

        • Guygasm

          Not exactly

        • OgreTactics

          And not “just”.

    • 1droidfan

      The papers and source code for all those techniques are available online by the people that invented them, its not like they came up with them own their own. Also, specular AA is not a big need once you have good temporal AA.

  • OgreTactics

    Why isn’t OpenVR supersampling being integrated as an out-of-the-box configuration for all VR experiences yet?

  • John Horn

    This is the prettiest 1080p I’ve seen without supersampling. But does this mean Star Citizen will also be able to benefit? Or did they only appropriate the netcode and the use of their cloud servers?

  • Nigerian Wizard

    Anti aliasing has nothing to do with graphical content let alone “realism”. What’s the writer smoking?!?

    • RocketRoach

      Moving stair-step artifacts and popping/sparkling visual noise have no effect on realism?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQ47MY-Eo0

      (Watch in HD)

      • Nigerian Wizard

        No it doesn’t.

        • RocketRoach

          Brilliant comeback.

  • Livenda Labs

    For Unity, CTAA – Cinematic Temporal Supersampled Anti-Aliasing from Livenda Labs has been available for Unity over the last year and is in use by hundreds of leading developers. All platforms such as PC, Consoles and all VR Devices are supported.
    More information and evaluation Demos available from http://www.livenda.com/

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6663869e3c3a14849fa39878b3384ce223c179aa12eba03c6b6a9a31f963b8f9.png

  • oompah

    Expert commentary is this :
    1.The wineglasses hung upside down at the back, look like paper cutouts. Totally unconvincing. (Fail totally)
    2. The glassware in front appears to be transparent like a sheet of glass, but having reflectivity . However absolutely no refraction so it appears like pushing something down ur throat. Somewhat convincing (for children only) but ridiculous when the viewer discerns the make believe. (fake views hah ha, me no Trump ;-)
    3. The views still appear plasticey & fake & unconvincing, though clever antialiasing seems to work in the video, however when the users actually use it then only they will discern whats what
    The developers may say that this is not ray tracing, true but unless & untill ray tracing like tech is developed all this is dud business.
    FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE