Aside from being a game developer, Epic is also the proprietor of the Unreal Engine, one of the most powerful and widely used engines on the marketplace. Every year, they show off a new iteration of the system at the Game Developers Conference, and 2013 was no different.
This year, they debuted a tech demo "trailer" of sorts titled Infiltrator. According to Epic vice president Mark Rein, the video was rendered entirely in real-time in Unreal Engine 4, running on a "single off-the-shelf Nvidia GTX 680."
The demo, which featured a high-tech commando in a futuristic setting, would have been impressive on a cutting edge system, but its ability to render those images on a single $500 card really shows off the engine's power. The thousands of simultaneous dynamic lights and real-time shadowing in huge and varied environments, coupled with extremely high-poly modeling, resulted in a visual presentation that would've looked great as a movie, much less an interactive game.
You can watch the demo below.
At their presentation, Epic took it a step farther and proved that Inflitrator was indeed running in real-time by first disabling all of the dynamic lighting, then by switching to a wireframe only mode.
The company also wanted to emphasize that aside from the obvious graphical capabilities of the engine, Unreal 4 would also facilitate faster and more efficient development pipelines. The new development environment will assist in streamlined asset creation by requiring far less coding, allowing artists to work independent of programmers for general tasks. This, alongside overhauled lighting and asset management capabilities, will in turn free up the time of the engineers for complex work.
Epic also presented a few new licenses, including Blacklight: Retribution developer Zombie Studios, who are currently working on the Unreal Engine 4 powered Daylight. The company has reported that it will reveal additional Unreal Engine 4 partners at a later date.