Unreal Engine 4 Being Shown at GDC Next Week


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Just Not to the Public

Next week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will see the unveiling of the next Unreal Engine, the software that powers many of the games we play on consoles, PCs and mobile devices. Epic Games is showing off the Unreal Engine 4 behind closed doors, meaning we might not hear too much about its next-gen platform for a while.

Epic says it will be previewing its next-generation game tech to "select licensees, partners and prospective customers during the exhibition." Those who do see it will be bound to non-disclosure agreements, meaning blabbing about the prospects of next-gen visuals is verboten.

The Unreal Engine maker showed off its "Samaritan" demo (pictured above) at last year's GDC, an "Unreal Engine 3 real-time demo [that] represents what Epic wants to see in the next generation of games." So expect something even prettier, whenever we get to see it.

Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, took to Twitter last week to get the hype for Unreal Engine primed, saying that internal demonstrations of its GDC demos "made people gasp, literally."

Unreal Engine 4

Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed on August 18, 2005 that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development since 2003.[10] The engine targets the next generation of PC hardware and consoles after the seventh generation. The only person to work on the Unreal Engine 4 core system design up to that point was Tim Sweeney, technical director and founder of Epic Games.[11]

Sweeney gave a speech at PoPL06 (the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages) that described aspects of how the Unreal Engine 3 worked at the time and "what we would like to write" in the future. He predicted the next generation of games consoles would arrive in 2009, at which time game designers would work with CPUs that had 20 or more cores, 80 or more hardware threads, and more than a teraflop of computing power.[12]

In March 2008, Sweeney predicted that the number of developers working on Unreal Engine 4 would be ramped up to three or four engineers by the end of that year, and implied that it would be aimed predominantly at the next generation of consoles rather than PCs.[13]

Sweeney has stated in a recent interview with IGN that Unreal Engine 4 will probably be ready for use in 2014.[14]

In February 2012, Mark Rein (the CEO of Epic) said "people are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4".

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I wish they could just tease us a little bit. The Samaritan demo looked great and this should look even better. Hopefully, this will mean a more PC gaming friendly eighth generation.

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  • 2 weeks later...

That is really impressive. I'm beginning to see why FXAA is better than MSAA. The article on Geforce.com explains why it's better and why they had to use it with their next-gen Kepler GPU.

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