With the Zenimax buyout, Microsoft has a number of really high tech proprietary game engines within their various game studios. Slipspace, Forzatech and idtech amoungst others.
I thought it would be interesting to talk about the various strengths and weaknesses of some of those engines, and which ones we expect to do amazing things in the future with.
So first up I thought about Forzatech. It is currently being updated by Turn 10 to take advantage of the new Direct X12 Ultimate extensions such as Mesh Shaders, VRS, SFS and Ray Tracing amoungst others. It’s a next gen focused engine, and will only release on the Series consoles and PC. Games that currently use this engine are Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon, Fable and apparently Flight Sim. There was some dispute about if Flight Sim used Forzatech or Asobos in house engine, but I fail to see why MS would have one of their games built using a smaller studios proprietary engine that MS doesn’t own.
From what I understand the first game to use the new and upgraded FT engine will be the upcoming Forza Motorsport. Forza Horizon 5 uses the older engine, and I would assume that Fable will also use the new engine due to its release date.
Forzatech excels in a number of areas, one being that it Is equally good in open games and also traditional games. Its a beast at optimisation of frame rate. It’s like idtech in that regard. It’s got that CPU workload down pat.
In my opinion, I think that the new Forza Motor Sport is going to be a level above what we have seen with Forza H 5. It’s expected to use RT in game, and also those DX12U extensions that will add to efficiencies such as Mesh Shaders, VRS and Sample Feedback Streaming.
One of the most amazing things about this engine is that it was created from the ground up by Turn 10, who arnt a big studio employee wise. As we have seen.with Slipspace, it’s not that easy to create a top tier game engine that can compete with the likes of UE. I would assume that Playground Games could have used any engine available to them, including UE if they wanted for Fable, and for them to stay with FT tells me the engine is going to make Fable look amazing.
Does anyone have any technical specifics they know about the engine, how it was created, and any interviews about it? Would love to learn more about it if possible.