Speaking at DICE Summit 2012, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeny has revealed that the Smaritan tech demo the company showcased at last year's GDC required a whopping 2.5 teraFLOPS to run.
That revelation has cast serious doubts that the next generation of console hardware will be capable of the level of graphical fidelty on display in the demo. The Xbox 360 currently sports a respectable .25 teraFLOPS, meaning Samaritan took about ten times the power of a current gen console to run in real time.
The most generous rumors we've heard so far place Microsoft's next gen hardware at just six times the power of the 360, well below what would be needed to achieve some of Samaritan's flashier effects.
There's a glimmer of hope here, though. The Samaritan demo was running on the Unreal Engine 3, which is likely to be outdated by the time the next generation of consoles is in full swing. It's possible that the engine's next iteration, expected to be revealed the public later this year, could allow similarly advanced tech to run on far more modest setups.