Makng a meaningful impact in the fiercely competitive first-person shooter market is no small feat. From thwarting alien invaders to taking down terrorist threats, trigger-happy players have pretty much done it all behind the crosshairs and muzzle flashes of this generation’s most popular genre. But Electronic Arts’ and DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is bringing a secret weapon to the fight that could separate it from all those formulaic fraggers: DICE’s proprietary Frostbite engine is finally making its way onto the PC, and the results are—quite literally—explosive.

Modern military juggernauts such as Activision’s Call of Duty franchise are already doing a damned fine job of filling our displays with eye-melting explosions and scary-real special effects, so we caught up with DICE’s rendering architect Johan Andersson for the scoop on what exactly their destruction-driving tech will bring to the battlefield.

“The Frostbite engine has been in development for over five years, to suit the needs of the complex and demanding games we develop here at DICE,” Andersson says. “Frostbite is our long-term technical platform for the studio and it’s constantly evolving. We build our destructible buildings through a painstaking process of splitting them up into a large amount of smaller parts and then, both manually and procedurally, add details in many layers. These layers consist of geometric details to get the ragged edges and varied broken edges around a freshly blown hole in a building, as well as special shading and texturing techniques to get the right type of cracks in the building plaster and soot around the impacts. It is quite a complex process, but one we feel is worth it to give gamers the ability to play in a destructible and dynamic environment.”

Spoken like a man who may be having a bit too much fun at his job, Andersson continues: “The explosions in Bad Company 2 are also an area we’ve worked on a lot with the visuals to give the feeling of having truly powerful weapons and vehicles. Seeing a tank explode is an awesome sight that is made up of a combination of many different types of particle, lighting, and post-effects to create a large, frightening explosion and cloud of smoke.”

Supporting Bad Company 2’s screen-swallowing destruction are equally immersive yet more-subtle PC-exclusive visual and audio effects. “One of the new PC-specific high-end features of the engine is an adapted version of a Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion filter. HBAO creates realistic and subtle soft contact shadows around objects in the game environment that improves our overall visual composition. On the audio side, Frostbite and Bad Company 2 feature what we call HDR audio, which is a technique to mix and prioritize all the audio in the dynamic battlefield to create an aural experience that is really in a league of its own, and something PC gamers haven’t heard before.”

Our discerning ears were treated to some of this HDR action while we were teaching our Russian enemies a lesson on taking cover—don’t hide behind the bushes, guys. While unleashing hell on these evil-doers during a downpour in a shallow stream, we were able to identify individual tracks for the falling rain, our puddle-splashing footsteps, and (obviously) every jarring explosion, bullet whiz, and satisfying weapon reload. Anyone who’s played any number of first-person shooters knows that more often than not, even after tweaking the hell out of your settings, the subtle sounds are too often drowned out by the room-rattling firefights. And, while we love our guns and grenades to “pop” and “boom” like their real-world counterparts, we also appreciate the opportunity to enjoy the full spectrum of sounds that put us on the virtual frontline. After spending some time in Bad Company 2’s aural paradise, we’re confident our ears will be begging for a new pair of 7.1 surround-sound headphones.

Specialized Microsoft DirectX 11 support complements DICE’s chaos-causing engine and claims of an unprecedented audio experience for the mouse-and-keyboard crowd. “All objects in the game world cast dynamic shadows on each other, which is one of the requirements to have very destructible environments,” says Andersson. “And because of that, one of our primary uses for DX11 is shadowmap-filtering to create [softer] and more realistic shadows. DX11 makes this easier, and at a very low performance cost. We also use DX11 in more general ways to improve performance in multiple areas.”

We were a little “busy” during our demo hightailing it from the explosive shells punching automobile-size holes in the walls all around us, so we may not have been able to fully take in the whole “soft shadows” thing. That said, there were noticeable layers of lighting and shadowing at work that changed depending on how big those holes were. Low-lit interiors would get a little brighter with each bullet-created crack, and beams of sunlight would bathe our battle-weary soldiers and envelop the previously dominant darkness when tanks blew gaping voids through our too-fragile and all-too-temporary shelters.

If turning towering structures into piles of smoking firewood and fragmented concrete in traditional two dimensions isn’t enough to give your adrenaline levels a healthy jolt, Bad Company 2 promises to amp up the immersion even more with native support for NVIDIA 3D stereo and multi-monitor rendering. Andersson’s geeky enthusiasm shines brighter than a flash grenade in a dark bunker when describing this firing-on-all-cylinders experience. “We’re very excited about the upcoming 3D Vision Surround support in the upcoming GF100 GPUs. Running Bad Company 2 in both stereo 3D and on three monitors at the same time will surely be an awesome experience, and require a very powerful GPU. NVIDIA engineers have helped us to implement, test, and tweak to make the most of it.”

Even the geekiest of gamers may not have brain-bending tech terms like “Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion” on their radar, so Andersson concluded our interview with this layman’s explanation of what fans can expect when they lock, load, and boot up Bad Company 2: “The main technical achievement of Bad Company 2 is not an individual feature or area, but the combination of all the technical parts like the destruction, vehicles, environments, HDR audio, and high-end visuals that—when used together with the well-balanced and varied gameplay—creates an unsurpassed and highly intense multi-player experience that is more than the sum of its parts. We are strong believers in using technology not for its own sake, or as shallow additions, but instead as a way to enhance and enable new core gameplay experiences.”

That all sounds great. Thanks, Johan. Is it okay if we go blow up more stuff now?