well i did not know this...

[revelator]

a good deal of id softwares employees now work for saber interactive it seems like tim willits.

saber has allways been on the forefront of rendering tech in mho, just look at timeshift a game from 2007 with visuals that even today measure up quite nicely.

The Saber3D engine was actually developed years before the timeshift release as i remember playing the demo on windows 98 xD around 2003, the first game that used the engine was "will rock".

The engine was probably one of the first to fully utilize shaders and boy does it utilize them... each map runs about several thousand shaders and in an interview with saber it actually came out that at the time they had to partner up with both nvidia and ATI for driver support because the current at that time drivers took several minutes to compile the shaders when loading a level which was not viable.

 

The engine is still used today in the halo series remakes and is updated constantly.

funny at that time not even the unreal engine could muster up to it either and it can still hold its own against most modern engines.

another funny thing is the engine is built in C not in C++ like most modern game engines today.

my guess is it made sense for the id folk as saber3d was also used for quake champions not idtech.