Battlefield of the Future: What We Want in Battlefield 3

For far too long have gamers waited for a true sequel to the Battlefield series. Bad Company 2 may yet stave our hunger for awhile yet, but it won't be long before we engorge ourselves on Battlefield 3.

by Ian Miles Cheong on 4th Jan, 2011

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What we know: Confirmed news related to Battlefield 3:

Frostbite 2 will not support Windows XP which makes it obvious that Battlefield 3 won't support Windows XP. DICE rendering architect Johan Andersson confirmed this via twitter saying, "Frostbite 2 is primarily developed for DX11. XP & DX9 is _not_ supported, 64-bit OS is recommended".
According to David Goldfarb, Lead designer and writer at DICE, the game will not be a PC exclusive but DICE is putting in an extra effort for the PC version.
Conferences will be held at GDC 11 showing off the new Frostbite Engine 2 -

SPU-based Deferred Shading in BATTLEFIELD 3 for Playstation 3 -

This session presents a detailed programmer oriented overview of our SPU based shading system implemented in DICE's Frostbite 2 engine and how it enables more visually rich environments in BATTLEFIELD 3 and better performance over traditional GPU-only based renderers. We explain in detail how our SPU Tile-based deferred shading system is implemented, and how it supports rich material variety, High Dynamic Range Lighting, and large amounts of light sources of different types through an extensive set of culling, occlusion and optimization techniques.

Culling the Battlefield: Data Oriented Design in Practice -

This talk will highlight the evolution of the object culling system used in the Frostbite engine over the years and why we decide to rewrite a system for BATTLEFIELD 3 that had worked well for 4 shipping titles. The new culling system is developed using a data oriented design that favors simple data layouts which enables very efficient computation using pipelined vector instructions. Concrete examples of how code is developed with this approach and the implications and benefits compared to traditional tree-based systems will be given.

Advanced translucent and subsurface scatter lighting for the frostbite 2 engine -

In real-time computer graphics, the interaction of light and matter is often reduced to local reflection described by Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions (BRDFs). While this mathematical model is valid for describing surface reflectance of opaque objects, many objects in nature are partly translucent: light travels within the surface. To simulate translucent properties of objects in real-time, such as subsurface scattering (in human skin and other surfaces), developers rely on complex and expensive techniques. Conversely, this talk presents a fast and scalable approximation of translucency for a convincing subsurface scattering look which can be implemented on current and next generation video gaming systems.