CryEngine 3 Demo Video Will Blow Your Mind

Let me put it this way: When CryTek says that its CryEngine 3 is "next-gen ready," it isn't kidding.

I'll admit that at least half of the above video is meant to showcase what CryEngine 3 can do to potential clients who are interested in licensing it for their games, because there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo about "Deferred Lighting" and "Integrated Voxel Objects," but let's not focus on that for the moment. Right now, we are here to look at the pretties. And it is very, very pretty.

We see examples of the engine running on the Xbox 360 and PS3 just fine - and yes, it looks stunning - but the real visual treats come when the engine shows scenes on what one can only assume is a top-of-the-line gaming PC. Yes, CryTek has been focusing intently on making CryEngine 3 scalable to run on lesser-end machines and consoles, but when you put this baby on a tiny gaming god and turn her loose? Sweet baby Moses. There's one bit of a girl running through a forest that almost approaches photorealism - though not quite there.

Some of the development tech might be interesting even to non-gamers, though - for example, the engine's ability to have edits made on the PC affect both the Xbox 360 and PS3 build of a game in real-time, which should make creating multiplatform games a bit simpler.

If you're really into the tech of it, there's a fairly in-depth analysis over at Eurogamer. Me? I'm just gonna stare at the visuals for a little while longer.