Unreal Engine 4 – Pure Particle Porn

I tweeted about this earlier last week after having a sneak peak at the article over on Eurogamer, but forgot to post about how tasty it looks. On a scale of one to anything smothered in barbecue sauce, this trailer for the Unreal Engine 4’s visual effects looks outrageously tasty.

The demo is run in real time on a single Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, the same way the Elemental Demo was shown at the Game Developers Conference last year, and shows off some new features including a new material layering system which will mean richer details on characters and objects, and dynamically lit particles. For the techie-r people among you, the engine also includes:

– High-quality temporal anti-aliasing, eliminating jagged edges and temporal aliasing
– Thousands of dynamic lights with tiled deferred shading
– Adaptive detail levels with artist-programmable tessellation and displacement
– Millions of particles colliding with the environment using GPU simulation
– Realistic destructibles, such as walls and floors
– Physically based materials, lighting and shading
– Full-scene High Dynamic Range reflections with support for varying glossiness
– Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) profiles for realistic lighting distributions

The engine’s predecessor, Unreal Engine 3, was a rampant success in the previous generation of consoles – Gears of War to name just one was visually stunning. Keep an eye on Epic Games’ latest offspring, because it will play a big role in the next generation consoles too.

Author: graemefinch

Teacher, avid Warcrafter, gifted Dungeons and Dragons character creator. Passionate about all things high fantasy and RPG. View all posts by graemefinch