SpartanEngine is a C++ game engine focused on cutting-edge real-time rendering and simulation, developed primarily as a long-running personal research project and now grown into a community-driven platform. It centers around a modern Vulkan renderer (with an in-progress DirectX 12 backend) and a fully bindless, unified deferred rendering pipeline designed to handle hundreds of millions of instances. The engine implements a wide range of advanced graphics features, such as atmospheric scattering, physically based shading, screen-space shadows and ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, sophisticated shadow mapping, volumetric fog, and HDR output. It supports next-gen performance and image quality technologies including variable rate shading, dynamic resolution scaling, temporal anti-aliasing, and upscaling via XeSS 2 and FSR 3. Beyond rendering, SpartanEngine offers PhysX-powered physics, CPU and GPU profiling, a thread pool for parallel workloads.
Features
- Modern Vulkan-first renderer with in-progress DirectX 12 backend and fully bindless design
- Advanced lighting stack including atmospheric scattering, SSAO, screen-space shadows and reflections, and high-quality shadow mapping
- Performance features such as variable rate shading, XeSS 2 and FSR 3 upscaling, dynamic resolution scaling, and TAA
- Physically based camera and environment with auto-exposure, physical light units, and frustum/Hi-Z occlusion culling
- PhysX-based physics, entity-component and event systems, thread pool, and CPU/GPU profiling tools
- Extensive asset support (many font, image, and model formats) plus multiple complex demo worlds out of the box