Amazon Lumberyard adds HDR support, plus native support for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

Amazon has given its Lumberyard engine a visual boost with the release of its 1.3 update.

Lumberyard now supports both HDR 10 and Dolby Vision as high-dynamic range solutions, in line with Microsoft’s recent announcement that HDR compatibility would be added to the Xbox Scorpio and Xbox One S.

“HDR 10 is going to be supported in most console hardware and Windows, so from an engine perspective, it’s about doing all of the math in the right space and authoring content for HDR, which Lumberyard excels at already,” said Amazon’s Hao Chen on the Lumberyard blog.

“We don’t know which technology will be favoured by consumers yet, but it doesn’t matter because Lumberyard supports both.”

Lumberyard now also supports both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality headsets out of the box, and now touts a framework said to be set to work with future VR hardware.

The engine’s graphical prowess has been improved in a number of areas, introducing a new depth of field technique that cuts back on edge-bleeding artifacts and uses less of the GPU, the replacement of glowing objects with emittance based on physics and lighting calculations, height mapped ambient occlusion and volumentric fog stability.

Lumberyard has also bolstered its performance on mobile, reportedly seeing up to a 15 per cent increase in rendering speed. Adaptive and scalable texture compression has also been added to the platform.