Last month, we saw the first screenshots of Epic’s first Unreal Engine 4 demo. Sadly, the full demo was kept from public eyes, so a handful of still shots was all we got.
Well, that’s been rectified. On its GeForce.com website, Nvidia has posted both the UE4 Elemental video, from which the screenshots originated, and another video that guides viewers through the engine’s individual features (including additions to make game developers’ lives easier). The videos are downloadable in 1080p format. Be warned though: they do make for a hefty download, weighing in at 1.4GB when put together.
If you don’t mind a slight step down in quality, the folks at GameTrailers have posted 720p, watermarked versions of the videos on YouTube:
Pretty impressive stuff. It was hard to tell from the screenshots, but the Elemental demo has loads of real-time destruction and liquid simulations. The real-time global illumination is pretty impressive, too. I imagine both features require a fairly quick GPU, however—in the latter half of the second video, the FPS counter seems to drop under the 30 FPS mark in at least a couple of places.
By the way, Nvidia’s UE4 coverage on GeForce.com includes an interview with Epic founder and tech guru Tim Sweeney. In the interview, Sweeney reveals that Nvidia’s PhysX API was used for physics collisions in the Elemental demo. He also confirms that, with UE4, he seeks to "define the next generation of graphics capabilities that are achievable with DirectX 11 PC’s and future consoles."