id Software’s Lead Renderer Programmer, Tiago Sousa, has shared some interesting tech details about Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. According to Sousa, Wolfenstein 2 sports almost 30X more drawcalls than DOOM, something that could explain why this game is a bit more demanding that it.

Going into more tech details, Wolfenstein 2 +30k drawcalls and up to +6 million triangles per frame. According to Sousa, that’s almost half a billion tris/2 million drawcalls per second.

Couple Wolfenstein 2 statistics: +30k drawcalls per frame, up to +6 million triangles per frame. That's almost half a billion tris/2 million drawcalls per sec. pic.twitter.com/OK7kU22CIw

— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017

In Wolfenstein 2, all “fog” is volumetric and unified. Moreover, every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering.

Couple Wolfenstein 2 geeky details: All "fog" is volumetric and unified, every light + shadow + indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering.

— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017

Furthermore, water surface is “tessellated” on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface.

Couple Wolfenstein 2 geeky details v2: Water surface is "tessellated" on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface. Water geom also uses async compute jobs to async with itself ( which is kind of crazy ).

— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017

As Sousa noted, this was mainly achieved thanks to the Vulkan API. Sousa concluded that while there is still room for improvement, Wolfenstein 2 currently runs 2X faster than most other games while doing much more under its hood.

You know, it runs more than 2x faster than every 99% of games in market while doing much more 🙂 But still room for improvement yes.

— Tiago Sousa (@idSoftwareTiago) November 2, 2017