Frostbite

Not to be confused with the Battlefield 2: Modern Combat multiplayer map.

The Frostbite engine is a game engine for first-person shooters developed by Digital Illusions CE. Its main features are its destructible environments, realtime lighting, selective sound prioritizing, long distance viewing and high graphical standards and resolution. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems. So far, two versions have been used, 1.0 and 1.5, and its latest version, 2.0, is under development.

Frostbite 1.0
The original Frostbite technology was developed by Digital Illusions CE (or DICE) for their first entry into the Bad Company series, Battlefield: Bad Company. This introduced the high amount of destructibility offered by the engine, allowing for almost every environmental piece to be destroyed, from walls to the ground itself.

As well, it allows for realtime lighting, allowing the lighting angles and effects to change dynamically without any modifications needed to be made to the environment.

It also allowed selective sound prioritizing, called the High Dynamic Range (HDR) Audio, meaning that it will select to emit more important and "louder" sounds, rather than every sound at once. For example, if a player is playing a radio, and a tank shell explodes beside them, the game will only emit the much louder explosion, and not the radio. This also allows for sounds of certain elements to change at different distances, different angles and in open and closed environments.

Frostbite 1.5
1.0 was very successful, and hence was further developed into Frostbite 1.5 with Battlefield 1943, which was enhanced with Destruction 2.0, allowing buildings to be completely destroyed. 8 months later, DICE released Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which featured even more enhancements to Destruction 2.0, allowing for large structures to be collapsed and crush everything within it, as well as the ability to chip away at lighter pieces of environments instead of them being destroyed as a single entity. This version was also used for Medal of Honor (2010)'s multiplayer, though with more limited destruction capabilities and vastly different weather effects.

Frostbite 2
Frostbite 2 is currently in development, and will be used for Battlefield 3. According to Wikipedia, it will take full advantage of the DirectX 11 API and 64-bit processors, with no support for DirectX 9 (nor, therefore, Windows XP). It will also feature enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor. At SIGGRAPH 2010, DICE gave several presentations on advances in their rendering technology:
 * "Tile-based deferred shading acceleration" via DirectCompute. This is being ported to the PlayStation 3's SPUs.
 * Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.
 * Quasi-realtime radiosity.
 * Improved environment destruction.
 * Realtime aproximated subsurface scattering.

Games

 * Battlefield: Bad Company - Frostbite 1.0
 * Battlefield 1943 - Frostbite 1.5
 * Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Frostbite 1.5
 * Battlefield 3 - Frostbite 2

Links and Sources

 * Wikipedia
 * Official site for Frostbite 2

Videos
Video:Battlefield: Bad Company - Frostbite Engine Trailer|DICE's presentation of Frostbite 1.0

Video:Frostbite 2.0: A Real-time Radiosity Architecture|Demonstration of Frostbite 2.0's realtime radiosity architecture

Video:Battlefield 3: E3 Frostbite 2 Features Trailer|E3 Frostbite 2 trailer