The Future of Gaming is UNREAL
Well E3 2012 is now in the rear view mirror and many are disappointed that Sony and Microsoft showed nothing about their next generation consoles. All wasn't lost though, as the next generation of gaming is on the horizon and once again it will be UNREAL. Always revolutionary, Epic Games, didn't disappoint anyone when they showed off its UNREAL 4 engine for the first time to the public.
I have talked about the UNREAL Engine before and how this has been the driving force behind how modern console gaming looks and now the UNREAL 4 Technology will be making a real demand from what is expected from a next generation consoles. It's not news to anyone that most current generation games run on UNREAL 3 with Gears of War 3 pushing the XBox 360 to its absolute graphic limits. Current consoles can't even run the new engine and the demo was run on a high end 1080P computer with Falcon Northwest Fragbox, augmented with Nvidia's Geforce GTX 680, so it would run smoothly.
Tim Sweeney (founder Epic Games) told GTTV that UNREAL 4 technology is designed to run on teraflop class hardware. This will be taking graphics to the next level, with current consoles having only 25% of the power needed to drive the engine. Sweeney didn't want improvement of 20 or even 30%, he wanted exponential improvement over current technology. That's not all Sweeney is looking to do, wanting to target the whole spectrum of gaming. UNREAL 4 is aiming to support anything with from the iPhone to high end PCs with great graphics and features.
The whole point of UNREAL 4 , as said by Mark Rein (VP Sales Epic Games), was to put the power in the artists hands. This demo shows how an artist can make changes and effect the look of a game with out having a programmer come in to make it work. UNREAL 4 is more powerful and requires way less code giving programmers more time to focus on mechanics and not how fast a tire should spin or high a ball should bounce. UNREAL 4 has turned every artist into a programmer, which is exciting to the future of gaming.
Cliff Bleszinski spoke to this demo, "it's where [Epic Games] thinks graphics should be...[and] we really want to set the bar for where we think next generation gaming should be."
2014 cannot come soon enough!
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