Behold: Here Are The First Unreal Engine 4 Screens

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Finally I can hope the PC platform can make a comeback. Games were looking pretty stagnant for the last 7 yrs. The only groundbreaking games I can remember in the last decade was Half-Life 2 and then Crysis(and Gears of War on the sidelines).
But Valve is doing an incremental upgrade to the now outdated Source engine and Crytek has shifted its focus to the console sector to avoid piracy. Finally it is Epic who is hopefully bringing the PC platform back.

The leaked specs of the next-gen consoles are pretty poor. The console makers are now more focused on peripherals more than on hardware. Who wants Kinect or PS Move? I haven't seen any good games that focused on peripherals. I do not want to play a Dance game. I would do that in real life.

For those who have been complaining about the lack of quality in these images, you probably haven't seen the Samaritan demo. And whatever Epic is showcasing now is definitely going to be better than the Samaritan demo. And these images are static, they will look better when rendered real time in game with dynamic lighting. Also Epic is showcasing the capabilities of the Engine for the developers i.e. how easy it will be to 'make' next-gen games.

And those who are complaining about the price of Kepler GPUs, they are going to cost less and become more powerful in the coming years. I think UE4 won't get released till 2013, by then the hardware will cost less.

And about the gameplay, remember Batman arkham asylum,arkham city, Borderlands,Gears of War,Infinity Blade,Mass Effect,Rainbow six,Tribes Ascend are all made using UE3.
 
what exactly does this picture represent now? A groundbreaking and breathtaking technology? One single screenshot can actually hold a post in toms hardware?
 
Are these screenshots supposed to impress us? I don't see anything more impressive than Unreal 3's already able to do, and even Skyrim. And it's nowhere near the quality-target that VrayRT and mental ray's realtime iterative renderers are currently pulling WITHOUT heavy GPU hardware.

http://jeffpatton.net/2011/04/why-iray/

Gonna have to do better than this, Epic. Bring it.
 
I think the greatest leap in visual fidelity lies not with better lighting tech, but better behavior of the underlying objects.

You might render a photo-realistic object, but the second you move it or act upon it and it does something stupid.. you've broken that trust that it's real. Having every game asset behaving perfectly accurately would be a greater jump in gaming than anything pure graphics can provide.
 
Ok.....so it needs a 680 to 'demo in public'.....k.....and they want this 'playability' in the next console/sooner......mmmhm.........

Well I hope enough pc developers invest in the full-fat version of this engine to keep us happy, cos as sure as hell, the current/immediate next consoles ain't gonna benifit on it's maxed settings - and there's the real problem for us!

Still, well done Epic!
 
In line with earlier comments, if the gameplay of a game is broken then it doesn't matter how pretty it looks, bust is bust.

I still occasionally fire up Half Life or DeusEx because the gameplay holds replayability. So many more recent games I have retraded because there is nothing left in them for me. Glitz without content will lose sales in the long run.

If UE4 will enable studios to produce better games in shorter time as the article implies then power to it.

However, it doesn't take fancy graphics to sell a good game - just look at minecraft !

Q
 
[citation][nom]lordstormdragon[/nom]Are these screenshots supposed to impress us? I don't see anything more impressive than Unreal 3's already able to do, and even Skyrim. And it's nowhere near the quality-target that VrayRT and mental ray's realtime iterative renderers are currently pulling WITHOUT heavy GPU hardware.http://jeffpatton.net/2011/04/why-iray/Gonna have to do better than this, Epic. Bring it.[/citation]

You probably missed the text in the brackets - "12 minute render time"
UE4 is real time rendering.
Edit: And it is not just one model, it is a whole level with 100's of models,phys objs,lights,etc.
"Hardware used is a whitebox (home built workstation) with (1) Quadro 6000 as the primary GPU, (1) Tesla c2070 as the secondary GPU, and finally (1) Tesla c2050 as the third GPU"
If that isn't heavy GPU hardware then what is?
 
So the engine plays with a GTX680 card. Why not release a game now for PCs and let the kiddie consoles catch up whenever?
 
"So the engine plays with a GTX680 card. Why not release a game now for PCs and let the kiddie consoles catch up whenever?"

Because this is a proprietary engine developed by Epic, they are the only one's with the technology right now, and their little tech demo is the first thing to even take use of the engine. Furthermore, the engine is really just a demo. As soon as you bring in real players and all the expected interactivity of a full fledged game, this engine will cripple your system down to 1 fps. It's going to take awhile before an engine like this can be used for a typical game.
 
No game company is ever going to impress me with an engine intended for consoles... because when they're new they're already weaker than the current state of the art, and when they're old they're INCREDIBLY weak... as in 'web game' weak, as in 'play it on facebook' weak (maybe a bit of hyperbole there). I've got both consoles (no the Wii doesn't qualify for me) but I don't buy console games for their graphics.

Now if the engine can scale to leverage all the goodness available in high end PC graphics then I'm mollified - but while the Samaritan demo blew me away - these screens are not awe inspiring.
 
BF3 looks good and it shows us realistic models not big death knights and other stuff weve not seen in real life. Hard to tell how good it really is. I'm not really impressed with the screen shots. In fact I think Crysis with all those realism mods look way better.
 
[citation][nom]chimera201[/nom]Finally I can hope the PC platform can make a comeback. Games were looking pretty stagnant for the last 7 yrs. The only groundbreaking games I can remember in the last decade was Half-Life 2 and then Crysis(and Gears of War on the sidelines).But Valve is doing an incremental upgrade to the now outdated Source engine and Crytek has shifted its focus to the console sector to avoid piracy. Finally it is Epic who is hopefully bringing the PC platform back.The leaked specs of the next-gen consoles are pretty poor. The console makers are now more focused on peripherals more than on hardware. Who wants Kinect or PS Move? I haven't seen any good games that focused on peripherals. I do not want to play a Dance game. I would do that in real life.For those who have been complaining about the lack of quality in these images, you probably haven't seen the Samaritan demo. And whatever Epic is showcasing now is definitely going to be better than the Samaritan demo. And these images are static, they will look better when rendered real time in game with dynamic lighting. Also Epic is showcasing the capabilities of the Engine for the developers i.e. how easy it will be to 'make' next-gen games.And those who are complaining about the price of Kepler GPUs, they are going to cost less and become more powerful in the coming years. I think UE4 won't get released till 2013, by then the hardware will cost less.And about the gameplay, remember Batman arkham asylum,arkham city, Borderlands,Gears of War,Infinity Blade,Mass Effect,Rainbow six,Tribes Ascend are all made using UE3.[/citation]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you cannot compare console specs to PC specs. It simply cannot be done. I challenge any competent system builder to build me a PC that can run Mass Effect 2 on medium settings at 1280x720p resolution with only 512MB of TOTAL system ram.

That means a 256MB VRAM graphics card and 256MB of DDR-something.

It can't be done. You cannot play Mass Effect 2 on a PC with that little amount of ram. You can't even run modern Windows with that little amount of RAM.

But both the Xbox 360 and PS3 do it. How is relevant but only to a point; what really matters is that they do.

 
@guardianangel42

First of all many ps3,x360 game developers have complained that they needed more RAM in the system.
How they still managed to make their games? Spending months on optimizing, finding bottlenecks and most important of all cutting out some features and scaling down some textures. I have read many articles on this in the past. I cannot find the links now but i found a recent link:. The point is the game devs ideas were limited by the system. They just couldn't go crazy with their ideas.

How does Mass Effect 2 run on a 256MB console. 2 reasons mostly - PC has Windows and many background processes running at the same time while a console optimizes all of its RAM to the game. You actually said the answer yourself - "You can't even run modern Windows with that little amount of RAM" . The other reason I'm not sure of actually but the PS3 has a 3.2GHz RAM while a PC only has around 800Mhz-1600MHz RAM. If you have enough RAM on a PC you can play almost any console game at medium settings at 720p,4xAA on a medium end 2007 PC. To actually prove this point, on my same machine Crysis 2 DX9 ran better than the original Crysis at the same settings. What did Crytek do - optimized their engine for the consoles. Try running Crysis 2 DX11 with high res textures on a console and you get special effects from the console box.

Now this point will be in favor of consoles actually - Since the consoles - a single configuration - is mass produced the individual cost of each console is less. And actually this cost is less than the manufacturing cost, they make their profits out of royalties from the games. Games on PC usually cost less. If you are a regular gamer what would you choose - a cheap console and highly priced games or a costly PC and cheap games? The developer would choose the console only for one reason - to combat piracy. If only piracy didn't existed , consoles wouldn't have existed.

The evolution of the PC hardware is mostly driven by games. The PC hardware has been stagnant for the last 5 years because of the consoles. Look at the performance of the third gen Core i7 and the Core 2 Duo that was released 6 years ago. 6 years and it hasn't even doubled(performance of processors at same price points in their respective years). At least the GPU manufacturers are doing something.
 
im lookin forward to Durango, even if its not up to par with PC. graphics aint all that as proven by the sales from phone/tablet games
 
I really hope they push the next gen consoles to the limit. If they don't i am not gonna bother with them anymore.
 
It all may be tied to a market study and with how many people are going to expend more than $500 to replace their current consoles. Don't answer to quickly "me, me, me, me ,me" because we are obviously the ones willing to expend that alone in a GPU.

But if MS or SONY want to stay on top of their game they should not open the door for a weaker player or even for a new player, if that is possible in this economy. And they may not be convinced the economy will give them that choice. I think they are afraid to compete on a high level and take a great risk this time so they already conceded a truce. Who knows, maybe the current time is perfect for MS and SONY to go for the gold and bring and amazing platform to the market without a mayor disturbance in the game. And that may be what Epic is trying to demonstrate.

This - little enthusiasm on mighty new hardware for next consoles - is a direct result from the success the Wii had in the first years. It showed a creative lesson to SONY and MS. Another lesson appeared in the portable platforms with iOS and Android competing with the PSP. On the other hand, once those lessons are learned and those market stablished, what new creative tricks are still left to trouble the next gaming platforms? What could be the risk now?
 
I say who cares, the best game epic ever made was Unreal Tournament 2004 other than that I could care less. Sure other companies will do much grander stuff with it, but honetly after this last year, and the game companies complete lack of respect for its customer, It is gonna have to be something damn good to make me shell out more money to just to play it.
 
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