Codemasters’ EGO Engine 4.0 Supports DX12 (Raster Ordered Views & Conservative Rasterization)


Following our previous story regarding Just Cause 3, another GDC 2016 session has revealed the DX12 features that have been implemented in Codemasters’ EGO Engine 4.0. According to the session, the engine powering F1 2015 already supports the new DX12 features Raster Ordered Views and Conservative Rasterization.

As its description reads:

“Codemasters present a post-mortem on their new rendering engine used for F1 2015 detailing how they balanced the apparently opposing goals optimizing for mainstream processor graphics, high end multi-core and DX12. The F1 2015 engine is Codemasters’ first to target the eighth generation of consoles and PC’s with a new engine architecture designed from scratch to distribute the games workload across many cores making it a great candidate for DX12 and utilise the processing power of high end PC’s. This session will show the enhanced the visuals created using a threaded CPU based particle system without increased the GPU demands and also cover the changes made to the engine while moving from DX11 to DX12. We will also discuss the graphics effects added using the new DX12 features Raster Ordered Views (AVSM and Decal Blending) and Conservative Rasterization (Voxel based ray tracing) adding even greater realism to the F1 world.”

What’s really interesting here is that F1 2015 does not support DX12. Whether we’ll be getting a DX12 patch or not remains a mystery. Our guess is that Codemasters has been experimenting with this API these past months and was able to implement some features to its latest version of the EGO Engine.

In other words, we expect the next game powered by the EGO Engine 4.0 to support DX12. Do note that DiRT Rally is powered by EGO Engine 3.0, so don’t expect a DX12 patch for this title.

The description of this session concludes that the takeaway is an insight “into the main architectural changes needed to move successfully to DX12 and realise a performance benefit together with an understanding of some of the new effects possible with feature level 12 capable hardware.”