CAPCOM’s R&D YouTube channel posted a series of videos focused on the RE Engine. One of these looks into the past and the future of the technology.
The RE Engine was arguably instrumental in CAPCOM’s renaissance, delivering improved features such as volumetric lighting, photogrammetry, more accurate physics simulations, etc., while providing high performance and stability. The company started working on it in April 2014, releasing the first game powered by the new engine in early 2017. Resident Evil VII: Biohazard turned a new leaf for CAPCOM, starting a streak of successful releases that lasted many years, arguably until Exoprimal.
Nearly all of the games released in this timespan (with the notable exception of Monster Hunter World, which is still powered by the old MT Framework) were made with RE Engine and have achieved significant critical and commercial success, propelling CAPCOM to record-breaking game sales and stock pricing. Here’s the full list:
However, CAPCOM isn’t resting on its laurels. For all its perks, even the RE Engine has its own issues. It needs to be able to handle large volumes of large size assets, and it also has to support a high degree of customization as games of different genres are made with it. Moreover, the engine is used by overseas contractors, requiring increased work in documentation, samples, and localization.
That’s why CAPCOM is now developing a new engine iteration called REX or RE neXt ENGINE. The new REX technology will be added to RE Engine in various phases. While we didn’t get much in the way of specifics, the following components were shown in a slide:
- REDox
- REUI
- RELog
- REFlows
- REAssetStream
- REProfiler
- RELauncher
- RERuntime
In another video posted on the R&D channel, CAPCOM went over some of the future rendering techniques that will be added to RE Engine. The main new rendering technique is Mesh Shaders, one of the new features introduced by DirectX 12 Ultimate.
CAPCOM said in-development games will render backgrounds using Mesh Shaders to reduce VRAM usage by compressing and decompressing data through meshlets. Users with GPUs that do not support Mesh Shaders won’t be left behind, anyway; CAPCOM has prepared code that mimics their functionality while running in vertex shaders.
It’s yet another hint that Mesh Shaders will be used more in future games after Alan Wake 2 famously dropped NVIDIA GTX 10 Series and AMD Radeon RX 5000 Series GPUs because they don’t support the feature. According to DSO Gaming, the game actually runs on those old graphics cards, but it’s not even remotely playable.
CAPCOM will also introduce the Visibility Buffer feature to RE Engine, thus eliminating the need for double vertex processing. Vertex data can also be restored via the Visibility Buffer, allowing different vertices and materials to be executed in a single draw call as long as they are in the same shader. Between Mesh Shaders and Visibility Buffer, CAPCOM aims to considerably reduce CPU and GPU loads.
