With the PS5 and Xbox Project Scarlett right around the corner, developers around the world are preparing their software kits and in-house engines for a significant upgrade to processing power, rendering, and more.
DICE, the studio behind Battlefield 5 and Star Wars Battlefront 2, is one such developer, whose famous Frostbite engine is notorious for both its visual might and logistical rigidity, delivering show-stopping graphics while also being responsible for Anthem's technical deficiencies, as EA continues to standardise the engine's use across its entire family of first-party studios.
In any case, DICE has been recently showcasing some of the Frostbite engine's next-gen capabilities with a series of public video montages on YouTube, mainly focused around that all too common barometer for video game tech; hair physics. The longest/most interesting video can be watched below, so see for yourself whether the studio's efforts are as impressive as you'd expect.
Forgetting the fact that there's a strangely macabre quality to the footage (I would not want to run into that mannequin in a dark alley), those hair physics are certainly worth paying attention to, exhibiting the behaviour and quality of the kind of mane you'd see from a high-end shampoo commercial.
DICE's goal with the Frostbite engine, at least in this regard, is to create real-time hair physics that are near photorealistic, allowing for more cinematic rendering that looks closer to the experience of watching a movie than a video game cutscene. We'll have to wait until Battlefield 6 or Star Wars: Battlefront 3 until we find out whether the studio achieves that milestone, but - for now - this montage proves things are looking very promising indeed for the next generation of hardware.
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