While Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 tech demo has been garnering quite a bit of attention as of late, Crytek boss Cevat Yerli has downplayed notions that it is a real breakthrough in graphics tech, stating that CryEngine 3 was already next-gen ready three years ago.

“Pretty soon you’re going to see the next iteration of CryEngine, and I’m not putting a number behind it, just the next iteration of CryEngine. Very soon. But we already said, CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago. We stand by that. If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it’s what we were seeing three years ago. We already had massive particle systems, we already had GPU rendering, all these things. Deferred shading. We had tessellation already since we shipped Crysis 2. We already had DX11,” Yerli told VentureBeat.

He added, “We didn’t just talk it up as tech demos, we have games that are shipped and are doing it.”

While Unreal Engine 3 has attracted the lion’s share of licensees this generation, Yerli believes the situation will be different next-gen.

“When you look at our number of licensees in that space, we have more licensees than any other engine in the online space. In the console space it’s a different story. In the console space we’re definitely not leading. But I think the next time around, it’s going to be a very different picture.”

For Crytek’s sake, here’s hoping CryEngine is more of a contender next-generation. I’ve always thought of them as the front-runners when it comes to implementing bleeding-edge graphics tech. Even though Crysis 2 wasn’t a PC exclusive, the DX11 patch that was released later makes for one of the most visually stunning titles to date. Consoles haven’t really given them a chance to shine, but it looks like that could change with the PS4 and next Xbox.

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