The Technology Powering Halo: Reach

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Halo 3 was really fun to play but the technology powering it seemed a little late for 2007, even though it featured some of the largest landfill arenas in modern day shooters. The newest addition in the series, which places the player in the shoes of an orbital drop shock trooper whose mission is to recover fragments of his teammates who disappeared during the events of New Mombasa, utilizes a modified version of the original Halo 3 engine.

Halo: Reach is being propagated as the next game to use technology that packs a wallop and this is what is being discussed as being put into the new engine that is being developed for the game. These features were spoken extensively at this years’ GDC conference with reference to DX11 technology:

Tessellators with close to 30K characters to achieve cinematic quality features.

The Hull Shader to patch control points in order to modify the behavioral pattern of the tessellator.

Domain Shader to optimize performance of the output of the GPU in order to mitigate bandwidth use.

These features allow real-time display of real-time images which are otherwise not achieved making creation of objects in the world easier for programmers whilst saving up on a limited memory module. Silhouette elaboration and terrain rendering whose objects offer a healthy degree of curvature.

All this allows for a visually heavy game in the Halo series. More as time elapses.