Epic Confirms Unreal Engine 4 At GDC 2012

There's really no better time of the year to unveil next-generation game engine technology than at the Game Developers Conference. Well, Epic is doing just that, with select licensees being able to view the next-gen engine in action before anyone else.

Last year Epic wowed audiences and the gaming community at large with the real-time Unreal Engine 3 demo of The Samaritan, which they later revealed is how they hope next-gen games will look.

I imagine the limited demonstration of the UE4 will probably center around more streamlined, optimized runtime libraries and performance for high-end visuals as they had showed off with the The Samaritan last year. The real-time demo, running on the UE3, required three overclocked 580GTX cards to process. I'd imagine that Epic would want to knock a card or two off of the table for the Unreal Engine 4.

Speculation about a possible announcement for the Unreal Engine 4 started earlier this year, with murmurings that the AAA engine developer would be dropping some news about the engine very soon. This was later followed up with comments from Epic's Mike Capps with Develop, about how the company would like to better support the indie community sooner with Unreal Engine 4 technology, especially after the huge success that came from the free-to-use Unreal Development Kit, which is a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3.

Epic will be attending the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California between March 5th and March 9th.

To learn more about Epic Games and the Unreal Engine, feel free to visit the Official Website.