Creators of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, EPIC, have announced that their long awaited Unreal Engine 4 (originally announced in 2005) is to get a 2012 release date, 2 years ahead of the original expected date.
Speaking at the DICE 2012 summit, founder of Epic, Tim Sweeney, made bold demands of the next generation of consoles, saying they will need 10 times the processing power of the current generation.
Since the original release of the Unreal Engine, its maximum settings required 1 Gigaflop of power to run at 1024×768, since then many leaps and bounds have been traveled and Unreal’s tech demo called “The Samaritan” which was released last year was a show on how far the current version of Unreal Engine 3 could be pushed at a resolution of 1920×1080, requiring a massive 2.5 Teraflops of processing power. Take into account that the aging Xbox 360 pushes its limits at 0.25 Teraflops and you can understand the need for some hefty upgrades.
Unreal Engine is possibly one of the biggest pieces of gaming middleware available today, and while its first appearance wasn’t a big selling game, the engine itself has been adapted to run games across numerous platforms from PC, Xbox and PS3 to more portable gaming devices such as NintendoDS, PSP and iOS.
~Stewart “lol… Teraflop” Loudon
