Real time
Rendering
A hybrid rasterizer and ray tracing pipeline that compiles from one shader source to DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Metal. Authoring does not branch on backend or hardware tier.
How the pipeline is put together
The renderer is a deferred base pass feeding a tiled light list, with an optional ray tracing resolve for reflections, contact shadows, and one bounce diffuse global illumination. When ray tracing hardware is absent we fall back to screen space tracing and light probes without changing the material or scene description.
Shaders are written once in the Crowe Shading Language and compiled to HLSL SM 6.6, SPIR V 1.6, and Metal Shading Language 3. The compiler runs the same optimization passes for every target so behavior stays consistent between a Windows workstation, a PlayStation 5 dev kit, and a Mac M series laptop.
Upscaling is integrated at the resolve stage. DLSS 3, FSR 3, XeSS, and Apple MetalFX expose the same interface. You pick a quality preset per platform and the engine wires the correct implementation.
What the renderer gives you out of the box
Hardware ray tracing
Uses DXR 1.1 and Vulkan Ray Tracing. Acceleration structures are built incrementally against scene streaming so build time does not spike when chunks page in. You choose which passes trace: reflections only, reflections plus shadows, or a full one bounce GI resolve.
- Incremental BVH refit during streaming
- Reflections with roughness aware denoise
- Contact hardening shadows
- One bounce diffuse GI with ReSTIR
Dynamic global illumination
A volumetric probe grid that updates every frame feeds indirect light to dynamic objects. Static geometry can optionally bake to the same probe format for a consistent look between interactive and cinematic scenes.
- Volumetric probes with temporal blend
- Screen space GI fallback on older GPUs
- Dynamic sky with Rayleigh and Mie scattering
- Unified light baker for consoles and PC
Physically based material graph
A node graph authors metallic roughness or specular gloss materials and compiles to a single shader permutation. Layered materials blend at the BRDF level, which means a stack of three layers costs one draw call.
- Up to 16 blended layers per surface
- Procedural textures with triplanar sampling
- Subsurface scattering with transmittance
- Anisotropy, clear coat, and sheen
Integrated post stack
Motion blur, depth of field, bloom, lens artifacts, and color grading run as a single fused compute pass on supported GPUs. No intermediate round trip to main memory, which matters on mobile and handheld targets.
- Bokeh depth of field with aperture shape
- Object and camera motion blur
- HDR bloom with five downsample chain
- OCIO compatible color management
Switching on ray tracing
Feature detection and configuration in the C# scripting API:
// Detect and enable ray tracing per platform
if (Renderer.Capabilities.SupportsRayTracing) {
Renderer.EnableRayTracing(RTFlags.Reflections | RTFlags.Shadows);
Renderer.RayTracingQuality = RTQuality.High;
}
// Author a PBR material once, it compiles for every backend
var material = Material.Create("Hero_Armor");
material.SetTexture("albedo", textures.HeroAlbedo);
material.SetTexture("normal", textures.HeroNormal);
material.SetTexture("orm", textures.HeroORM); // occlusion / roughness / metallic
material.SetFloat ("clearCoat", 0.35f);
meshRenderer.Material = material;Measured performance, not projections
Numbers below are from the Crowe reference scene (2.4 million triangles, 512 dynamic lights) on an RTX 4070, captured over a thirty minute window.
Where teams run it in production
Shipping AAA titles
Ray traced reflections and one bounce GI on current generation consoles while holding a 60 frame per second target. Scales down to a screen space path for the Steam Deck class of device without a second authoring pass.
Architectural review
OCIO color management and physically correct sun and sky let review rooms match offline renders to within two percent luminance, so design decisions do not shift between tool and engine.
VR and handheld
Foveated rendering, variable rate shading, and a fused post pass keep frame times predictable at 90 Hz stereo on Quest class headsets and 60 Hz on Switch class hardware.
Keep reading
Physics simulation
How the deterministic solver feeds the same depth and motion buffers that the renderer consumes for post effects.
World Editor
Author scenes, light them, and iterate on materials with the renderer running live against the edit stream.
Core systems reference
Full API reference for the render graph, material library, and shader compiler.
Build against it
Download the SDK, open the reference scene, and have a ray traced build running in under ten minutes.