Deferred Renderer - This game uses a deferred renderer which allows the dramatic lighting effects in this game. The renderer renders the entire scene in a single-pass and puts all the data in a special G-Buffer. In this way, the lighting can be rendered after the geometry as needed. Lighting layers exist such as the albedo, normal mapping, shininess, and other properties.
Real-Time Radiosity - Via DirectCompute this game uses real-time radiosity. This is exciting because most games use a fake method of light rays by approximation. The developers for this game developed a real-time radiosity lighting engine that bounce the light off objects more precisely. This game is constantly update the radiosity model for the entire scene. All of this is done by DirectCompute so that it works on any DX11 video card.
HDAO - AMD's High Definition Ambient Occlusion is included using DirectCompute. The game does also support standard SSAO. Since HDAO is rendered via DirectCompute any video card can do it.
BC7 Texture Compression - This one is quite exciting. For a long times, and for most games, the type of texture compression used is "DXT" which is a standard in DirectX. DXT isn't perfect though, there is better texture compression out there with less artifacts and errors when compressing the texture which lessens the image quality. DX11 supports a new texture compression method called BC7. This still compresses at the same ratio as DXT but with much less artifacts and errors. This simply means, better performing textures, and better looking textures.
Contact Hardening Shadows - This is another AMD technology, but also using DirectCompute so any video card can do it, NVIDIA or AMD. This technologically basically softens shadow edges depending on the distance of the shadow from the light source. It makes shadows look more realistic.
GPU-Accelerated Particles - This is another new technology which is very exciting for this game, and the industry. Instead of using a proprietary engine like PhysX with NVIDIA GPUs the game developers used DX11's DirectCompute to allow the GPU to accelerate particles on the GPU. By using DirectCompute that means GPU accelerated particles works on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. The particle effects include fire, smoke, streams and sparks from items in the game.
Silhouette-enhancing Tessellation - Tessellation is not forgotten either in this game. This game adds detail via tessellation based on the distance of objects to the player. The closer the object, the more tessellation it can receive to look better, the farther away, less is needed.
