Video: Unreal Engine 3 - A Glimpse of the Future of Gaming

Just a few days ago, we featured a gameplay trailer of Battlefield 3, showcasing the power of its new Frostbite 2 engine. Now, Epic Games, the development studio behind the Gears of War series, Bulletstorm, and its proprietary Unreal Engine, unveiled an improved Unreal Engine 3, and a tech demo entitled "Samaritan" featuring its new graphics rendering capabilities.

Here are some of the featues of the Unreal Engine 3 (taken from Gameinformer.com)


Important DirectX features now shipping with Unreal Development Kit  include:

• Tessellation and displacement
• Geometry shaders
• Multisampled textures
• Shader Model 5

High-end rendering features include:

• Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing
• Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive
• Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before
• Deferred rendering with MSAA support
• Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh
• High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources

This might sound gibberish to most of us mere mortals, but here's the "Samaritan" Tech Demo, just so we can see for ourselves what the above translates into. Take note that the video below was rendered in REAL TIME, and not an animated and recorded CGI. 





Personally, I was blown away with how all the elements of the tech demo were realistically rendered, particularly on the lighting and shadows. And notice the lifelike rendering of the skin of the characters. This is just really impressive! Just imagine the potential of this technology with gaming in the next few years. So far, this demo only ran on PC. Although devs can also design games for consoles utilizing this new engine as stated in their site, I'm hoping that they can utilize both the full potential of the engine and the hardware, for an optimal gaming experience.


Gaming technology and development just keeps getting better and better, that I might still be hooked into gaming for the rest of my life! LOL.