Epic have been working on their new Unreal Engine 4 for sometime, and it’s shaping up to be an incredibly impressive game engine. Unreal Engine is just about the most popular game engine out there, and is in a massive variety of titles, from racing games to shooters. Some of the biggest titles in gaming such as Gears of War or Mass Effect are of course using the title.
Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One will however be firmly showcasing their performance this coming Christmas however. A glut of new titles using Unreal Engine 4 will be released according to Epic Games EU territory manager Mike Gamble.
“There haven’t really been any announcements of the games still under wraps [titles which are using Unreal Engine 4] – as soon as they start going live, then you’ll suddenly see that we’re everywhere again,” Gamble explained. “You’ll be thoroughly sick of us!”
“It’ll happen this year, toward the Christmas period,” said Gamble of the next-generation leap. “
Interestingly enough, Gamble doesn’t think there’s much in it between the PS4 and X1. This is despite controversy regarding the performance of the X1 compared to the PS4 which as featured in the news. Most recently with Tomb Raider, which has been proven to run at roughly half the frame rate on Microsoft’s console. Gamble says: “there’s really no difference” between PS4 and Xbox One.
Gamble does however make it clear that if you’re looking for the best gaming experience, particularly where graphics are concerned, then the PC is where it’s at.
PC vs PS4 elemental demo columns
“You’ve only got to look at the console business over the last 15 years…[console] hardware’s locked and at the end of the cycle the delta between PC and console is massive,” explained Gamble. “That’s always going to be the case because PC is always going to be an upgradeable piece of kit. That won’t change. And PC gamers will always be smug because they can upgrade.”
This isn’t going to come as much of a surprising given Epic’s Samaritan Demo, which required 2.5TFLOPS of computing performance to run. The Samaritan demo was running using Unreal Engine 3, and served to demo what Epic wanted to show off on next generation consoles. In the end, both next generation consoles fell way short of this number.
There have also been numerous reports that SVOGI (which is a lighting technique) was removed simply because of the limitations of console hardware. For more on this, and to check out a full breakdown of the PS4 vs PC elemental demo check out our article. The PC that the elemental demo was ran on included 16GB RAM, an Intel I7 and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 680.
He also hinted at the release date for more games featuring UE4, “Knowing the games that are in development, there are some crackers. The first quarter of 2015 is also where a lot of them seem to be aiming.”
Latest interview comes to us from Edge-Online.
