The Spartan Game Engine is a free, cross platform C++ game engine we first looked back in 2021. Since then the game engine has continued to be involved and improved. The project started as a one man effort to create a game engine that he used to get a job in the industry and since then he has continued to add new features. Features of the Spartan Game Engine include:
Rendering
- Cutting edge Vulkan renderer.
- 128-byte push constant buffer for lightning fast CPU to GPU data transfer.
- On the fly single dispatch GPU-based mip generation for render targets (FidelityFX SPD).
- On the fly compression and mip generation for material textures (FidelityFX Compressonator).
- Fully bindless design (materials, lights, even the samplers).
- Fast dual paraboloid point lights.
- Vulkan (main) and DirectX 12 (wip) backends with universal HLSL shaders.
- Unified deferred rendering with transparency (BSDF with same render path).
- Atmospheric scattering, real-time filtering and image-based lighting (with bent normals).
- Real-time global illumination (FidelityFX Brixelizer GI).
- Screen space shadows (Bend Studio’s Days Gone).
- Screen space ambient occlusion (XeGTAO + visibility bitfield).
- Screen space reflections (FidelityFX SSSR).
- Variable rate shading.
- Upscaling (XeSS 2 & FSR 3).
- Dynamic resolution scaling (fed directly into the upscalers).
- Temporal anti-aliasing.
- Breadcrumbs for tracing GPU crashes on AMD (FidelityFX Breadcrumbs).
- Advanced shadow features with penumbra and colored translucency.
- Physical light units (intensity from lumens and color from kelvin).
- Frustum & occlusion (Hi-Z) culling.
- Physically based camera.
- Volumetric fog.
- HDR10 output.
- Post-process effects like fxaa, bloom, motion-blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration etc.
General
- One-click project generation for easy setup.
- Universal input support, keyboard & mouse, controllers (tested a PS5 controller) and steering wheels.
- Comprehensive physics features (PhysX).
- CPU & GPU profiling.
- XML support for data handling.
- Thread pool that can consume any workload.
- Entity-component, event systems and most things you’ll expect to find in a modern engine.
- Wide file format support: 10+ for fonts, 30+ for images, and 40+ for models.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Spartan Game Engine and see it in action in the video below.