Unreal Engine 4 to be much more advanced than Samaritan demo

“If Samaritan looked like a piece of ****, that’s what Unreal Engine 4 would look like,” Rein told us.

March 12, 2012 12:30 PM21

Shacknews had the opportunity to sit down on a private, invite-only press conference with Epic Games. At one point during the presentation, the Unreal Engine 4 logo appeared on the screen. (It’s blue now, FYI.) Epic Games’ Mark Rein told us that the company was showing off its next-generation engine at Game Developers Conference–but only to developers. The public reveal will happen later this year, Rein reconfirmed.

But what is Unreal Engine 4? And how does it compare to Samaritan, the high-powered Unreal Engine 3 demo that’s been shown off for years? “If Samaritan looked like a piece of crap, that’s what Unreal Engine 4 would look like,” Rein told us.

So what is Samaritan? “Our goal with Samaritan was to show you the future,” Rein said. “It came a lot sooner than we expected.”

He proceeded to show us a real-time demonstration of the Samaritan demo running on a single unannounced graphics card coming from NVIDIA. Codenamed “Kepler,” the new graphics card runs on a standard power supply and is able to render a demo that originally took three GeForce GTX 580s to process.

“We didn’t expect this to come out so soon,” Rein told us. “If they can do this this year on a single video card, maybe next year on a laptop.”

With PC tech progressing even more rapidly than Epic Games had anticipated, it’s likely Unreal Engine 4, ready “around 2014” will be far more demanding. And with Unreal Engine 4 aiming for next generation consoles, it wouldn’t be too unrealistic to expect the next Xbox to offer more than 10 times the power of the current system.