At the beginning of the development of Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes decided not to licence an existing engine, because none of those was able to render the world of Gothic 3 without loading screens. That's why they coded an engine by themself, called "Genome Engine". This multithread designed engine offers a great foresight, dynamic lighting (including self-shadowing), a dynamic weather system, depth of field, high quality reflections and bloom or rather HDR based on Pixel Shader 3.0 and DirectX 9. The vegetation rendering is provided by SpeedTree as well as Bink Video Techonology for video cutscenes,Ageia's PhysX physics engine for physic simulation and FMOD Sound System for sound playback.