Speaking at Games Convention Developers Conference 2008 in Leipzig, Germany, Crytek CEO and President Cevat Yerli said the studio’s next engine should be ready for sometime in 2012. As of right now, he says, the degree to which graphics can represent real-life is bottlenecked by a lack of new hardware. He says GPU and CPU technology are converging, evident in the new technologies in development at Nvidia and ATI, as well as what Intel’s doing with Larrabee. Until the growing trend of CPU and GPU convergence is more defined, developers will have to focus on increased graphical stylization as well as more advanced physics and AI programming.

Crytek’s previous engines include the CryEngine 1, which powered the first-person shooter Far Cry in 2004, and CryEngine 2, which was used for Crysis as well as the upcoming Crysis Warhead. Yerli believes this engine technology will be more than sufficient in powering games through 2012, when he expects Microsoft and Sony to release their new consoles.

Development in the future will require studios to more effectively streamline their production processes, both on the technical and office workflow side of things. In five years, Yerli seemed confident that real-time gaming graphics will match current CGI offline rendering. As of right now, Crytek is still working to increase efficiency with its CryEngine 2 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 platforms. Yerli mentioned that the PlayStation 3 required an extra degree of work, but the company is convinced it’s worth the effort to get the engine running properly on Sony’s platform.

In the latter part of 2009 is when Yerli expects Crytek to begin full production in its next engine, which will be tailored for development across multiple platforms. Until then, he’s excited by the gameplay possibilities that may become possible as developers focus on technical aspects aside from graphical realism, though he didn’t go into many specific examples of what was possible.

Source: IGN