Frostbite

Not to be confused with the Battlefield 2: Modern Combat Multiplayer Map. Not to be confused with the Battlefield Heroes Weapon.

Early logo for Frostbite 1.

The logo for Frostbite 1.

The logo for Frostbite 2.

The logo for Frostbite 3.

The current logo of Frostbite from late 2023 onwards.

The Frostbite engine is a game engine developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and the flagship game engine used throughout the Battlefield series since 2008's Battlefield: Bad Company; the series previously used the Refractor engine.

The engine's main features include: destructible environments, real-time lighting, selective sound prioritizing, long distance viewing and high graphical standards and resolution. Games running on the engine have been released on Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Google Stadia. As of 2022, four versions of the Frostbite engine have been developed: Frostbite 1, 1.5, 2, and 3.

Development[]

Frostbite 1[]

DICE started development of the original Frostbite technology in April 2004^[1] and subsequently used it in their first entry of 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 real-time 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[]

Frostbite 1.0 was very successful, and hence was further developed into Frostbite 1.5 with Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which was enhanced with destruction in later game, 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[]

Shading and radiosity architecture

Character animation using ANT

Audio editing

Frostbite 2^[2] is used for Battlefield 3. The engine takes full advantage of the DirectX 11 API and 64-bit processors, with no support for DirectX 9 (nor, therefore, Windows XP).^[3] It also features enhanced in-game destruction, creating more refined physics than its predecessor. It is also used for many other EA titles, such as Need for Speed: The Run and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

At SIGGRAPH 2010, DICE gave several presentations on advances in their rendering technology:

"Tile-based deferred shading acceleration" via DirectCompute.^[4] This is being ported to the PlayStation 3's SPUs.
Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.^[4]
Quasi-realtime radiosity.^[5]
Improved environment destruction.^[6]
Realtime approximated subsurface scattering.^[7]

Frostbite 3[]

Features of Frostbite 3

Dynamic weather changes are a new feature in Frostbite 3.

Frostbite 3 debuted with Battlefield 4 and used in other EA games ranging from First-Person Shooters, Racing games, Role-Playing games and even Sport games. Frostbite 3 is the current version of the Frostbite engine to date, with a reworked version serving as the engine used in Battlefield 2042, Need for Speed: Unbound and FIFA 23.^[8]

Initially, the engine was going to see usage on the Wii U, but due to the console's lower specifications (and having declared the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as "lower-specification machines"), DICE decided not to release games running on the engine on the platform.^[9] However, the release of 2019's Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville on the Nintendo Switch in early 2021 brought the engine to Nintendo platforms for the first time.^[10]

The game engine has several upgrades including improved tessellation technology. It also features enhanced in-game destruction, allow for more destructible environments, enhanced micro-destruction and larger scale destruction and a new feature, Levolution.

Levolution allows players to destroy certain key objects which will then impact the map (ranging from the immediate area to the entire map) and gameplay afterwards. Dynamic water behavior has been introduced. Water acts more aggressively, waves have been implemented and players now face a real water surface that will react to all entities such as players and vehicles.

Frostbite 3 has seen additions to the engine in newer titles. Starting with Battlefield 1 and refined in Battlefield V, introduce dynamic weather, a type of Levolution, to the engine. Battlefield V also introduces ray-tracing through Nvidia RTX and Nvidia DLSS on PC. Need for Speed Unbound introduces AMD FSR 2.0 and Intel XeSS upscaling.

2023 Rebrand[]

Frostbite (2023) logo

Frostbite (2023) logo variations

On December 18, 2023, EA announced the new vision and logo of the Frostbite engine, emphasizes on "platform for collaborative innovation". The rebrand reflects the change in philosophy, prioritizes on flexibility and experience for developers to ensure the engine being the best choice for developing their games.^[11]

Games using Frostbite[]