You know that Samaritan demo everyone was talking about at this year’s GDC? Well, none of that was cinematic. It was all real-time. To hammer in that point Mark Rein confirmed in a recent interview that the Samaritan demo was using advanced middleware to achieve the look and feel Epic pulled off with the highly impressive demo.
Tech Web’s Game Network conducted an interview with Epic’s Vice President, Mark Rein, and he talked extensively about a lot of what Epic has done and what they will work on. One of the most interesting tidbits, though, is that the highly talked about Samaritan tech demo was actually running in realtime and here’s what Rein had to say about it…
worked with NVIDIA to incorporate their cutting-edge physics refinements for our GDC "Samaritan" demo. This was a real-time Unreal Engine 3 demo showing our proposal for what the next generation of gaming will look like. Shortly after GDC, we released all of this cool DirectX 11 technology to our licensees and users of the Unreal Development Kit.
That’s right folks…real-time. The tech demo was also running on advanced versions of Nvidia’s PhysX, APEX and 3D tech, all of which were incorporated into the Unreal Engine 3 to pull off that breathtaking Samaritan demo. After seeing something like that, though, it really makes you question why 3D in movies and television looks so bad?
Anyway, it also makes you question if Mark Rein just let slip that the Samaritan is actually The Samaritan for the PS4 and Xbox 720? Or is still just a tech demo of what we can expect to see from next-gen consoles? Doesn’t really matter either way because at least we know that the generational leap from current-gen consoles to next-gen hardware will actually be groundbreaking and I for one cannot wait. But don’t expect to see any of that kind of software running on today’s hardware, given that supposedly the tech demo ran on multiple over-clocked GTX 580s.
You can check the rest of the interview with Epic’s Mark Rein over at Tech Web’s Game Network.
