Epic Games VP Is Impressed With PS4's Hardware

[Steven Bogos]

Epic Games VP Is Impressed With PS4's Hardware

Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, says "[the PS4] is a phenomenal piece of hardware and we're going to do amazing things with it."

Chances are you've played somewhere between one and ten games that run on Unreal Engine 3. The engine has dominated the current console generation, providing the inner workings for smash hits like Bioshock, Gears of War, Dishonored and Batman: Arkham Aslyum. So when the vice president of Epic Games, the folks behind the Unreal engine, is impressed with the hardware of the PS4, it's a good sign, as we are sure to see numerous games in the upcoming console generation built on Unreal Engine 4.

When asked if he got what he wanted with the PS4, Rein replied "Yeah, we're really pleased with what we got - at least so far from Sony. Tim Sweeney is really the best person to ask that question but he's over the moon with it." He explained that it is really important for next-gen consoles to use off-the-shelf PC parts, as it makes it much easier for developers to make games for it. "It's a smart thing to do. They're going to benefit from it - there won't be that whole 'how do we make this work', there's just going to be 'wow, what can we do with this?' And we'll do great things."

"It's like giving you the world's best PC. 'We're going to make it super convenient, we're going to make it easy for you to get games on there, we're going to start the games running while you're downloading them and we're going to perform your updates in the background.' You're not going to turn this thing off... you're just going to sleep it and it's going to come back on."

Rein says that it is "abundantly clear" that the PS4 is being developed as a collaboration between Eastern and Western philosophies. Sony, a Japanese company, has traditionally developed their PlayStation consoles first and foremost for Japanese developers, much to the disdain of Western developers looking to create cross-platform games. He expects the next generation of consoles to exhibit a high level of convenience. "To have [convenience] combined with amazing hardware specs that everybody will have, at I'm sure will be a reasonable price... it will be good for everybody."

Fortnite will be the first Unreal Engine 4 title to be published by Epic Games. Rein hesitated to offer up more details of the zombie-survival game, but assured us that "It's because it's so good that we're going to take our time with it, then we're going to have a very slow rollout of it, get a few hundred people to play it and do cool things. It's got such a long lifespan that we just don't want to rush it."

Source: CVG [http://www.computerandvideogames.com/398783/interviews/interview-were-more-epic-than-weve-ever-been/?page=1#top_banner]

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[Evil Smurf]

Well it has the power of an average consumer computer, and the PS3 is weaksauce now (comparatively) so it is a nice spec jump.

 

[Deathlyphil]

Isn't Epic one of the companies that believes that better graphics is the most important part of a game?

Graphics is emotions!

 

[Latinidiot]

Isn't Epic one of the companies that believes that better graphics is the most important part of a game?

Graphics is emotions!

Look at the polygons! LOOK AT THEM!

ADMIRE THE GONS AND SUFFEEEEEEEEEER



[small][small]EMOTIONALLYYYYYYYYYYYYY[/small][/small]

 

[The White Hunter]

Well it has the power of an average consumer computer, and the PS3 is weaksauce now (comparatively) so it is a nice spec jump.

I'd say it has slightly more power than the average consumer computer. It's basically a mid-range gaming PC from 2 years ago, most consumer computers in the same price range wouldn't have anything above intel integrated graphics and an i3.

Still, there are more powerful PC's out there and they're available for around £600 from scracth (less if you skimp on case and mobo). I'm looking forward to whatever next gen brings, slightly lower specs can be a boon in a way, keeping the requirements down and meaning PC gamers don't have to upgrade so often.

I'm also excited by the prospects of octo-core AMD APU's being in consoles. Provides steady income for AMD and helps prevent the terror that would be a monopoly run by Nvidia and Intel. It also means we'll see games start to take advantage of more than 3 or 4 cores.

8 of them in fact.

Delicious multithreaded functions

Edit: Does anyone have a link to that next-gen Unreal 4 tech demo running at anything above 720p?

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

To be honest, you will see games on PS4 that looks better than anything we have now. While on iron level it's just a tad better than average gaming PC you're forgetting that PS4 is iron level coding for devs. No Windows, no drivers. There's a reason why 512 mb of RAM in console basically equals 4 gb in a PC for games.
Of course you can get, for example, 32 GB of RAM right now. But that's not your average PC and it's not GDDR5.

 

[Hawkeye21]

If you are impressed by PS4, it just means you are too easily impressed.

There's a reason why 512 mb of RAM in console basically equals 4 gb in a PC for games.

Do you even know what RAM does?

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

But that's not your average PC and it's not GDDR5.

We still don't know what they mean by GDDR5, as currently, it is exclusively VRAM.

I still think that the PS4 will have a combined RAM of 8GB, and part of that 8GB is VRAM.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

If you are impressed by PS4, it just means you are too easily impressed.

There's a reason why 512 mb of RAM in console basically equals 4 gb in a PC for games.

Do you even know what RAM does?

Do you know what a "driver"? Almost every asset requires more memory space on PC.

 

[Something Amyss]

Isn't Epic one of the companies that believes that better graphics is the most important part of a game?

Graphics is emotions!

Doesn't that basically make them on par with the average gamer?

 

[Able Seacat]

I don't really know why the specs are a big deal. The console with the best specs has never sold the most. It's the quality of the games that count people.