Last year Epic Games showed the next-generation "Samaritan" demo, which used a litany of new technologies to create one of the most impressive graphics presentations to date. At that time, Samaritan ran on three high-end Nvidia graphic cards and a power source the size of a cinder block. Today, Epic Games is able to run Samaritan on a single card, the Nvidia Kepler hardware, which powers their new line of GPUs. But that's not all they can get the Kepler to do.
"That board we ran the Samaritan demo on is the same board we're running the Unreal Engine 4 demos on," Epic Games vice president Mark Rein told Vox Games, referring to a demo of the company's next engine, shown behind closed doors at the GDC and accompanied by a severe non-disclosure agreement.
This means Unreal Engine 4 is running on hardware that will be available to the public very soon.
When asked if that meant Unreal Engine 4 was designed for the next-generation of consoles, Rein said, "It just means, that next big leap in gaming technology, Unreal Engine 4 will power that. We expect that to be consoles, but Nvidia is making PCs do it. Sooner or later, it could be pads doing it. We're not being snobby saying it should be this or that."
Rein clarified that Unreal Engine 3 won't disappear when developers begin using Unreal Engine 4. In fact, Samaritan isn't even hitting the limit of UE3.
"We can get so more out of that card than what you saw in Samaritan," said Rein.