Mass Effect Andromeda developer EA has hinted at some pretty interesting information. It is no secret that Andromeda is being developed using Frostbite. Same engine is used for Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront and more.
According to EA, the engine went through a transition and it already supports DX12. They aren’t telling us which game is going to be the first to use DX12, but Mass Effect Andromeda is a strong candidate. Also, the next Battlefield is most certainly using DX12, if as the developers say, the engine now supports DX12.
While that is speculation and assumption, something that has been confirmed is that Mass Effect Andromeda, Battlefield 5 and other future Frostbite games will use PBR (Physically-based Rendering).
Physically-Based Rendering is a popular technique being used now by developers to make objects more photo realistic/natural-looking. Instead of using multiple diffuse textures/specular maps for objects to represent different conditions in the game, developers can use PBR to create one texture for each part of the object.
From here on, developers artificially represent properties like a refractive index to help define parameters for physics model that controls how light and shadows behave during the rendering of frames of an in-game scene that contains that object.
PBR saves time and makes life a bit easy for developers when working on lighting and shadows in the game, while making objects look more realistic than ever. Mass Effect Andromeda is expected to look amazing with PBR and we can expect the same from Battlefield 5.
However, we have to wait for some in-game/in-engine footage to see how both of these titles benefit from PBR.
