Epic: Unreal Engine 4 Makes Samaritan Demo Seem “Like a Piece of Crap”

Epic vice president Mark Rein has said that the graphical capabilities of the studio's next-gen tech, Unreal Engine 4, far exceed those on display in their Samaritan tech demo.

"If Samaritan looked like a piece of crap, that's what Unreal Engine 4 would look like," Rein proclaimed in a recent interview with Shacknews.

Part of the reason for the dramatic leap, Rein says, is that PC tech has advanced at a much faster rate than they had anticipated. The Samaritan demo, which originally took three top end graphics cards to run in real time, can now be rendered easily by a single NVIDIA card (albeit one that's not yet on the market). Unreal Engine 4, expected to be ready for use in 2014, will assumedly take advantage of these advances to push the next generation of PCs and consoles to their limits.

Epic gave the first closed-door demonstrations of Unreal 4 to a select group of developers at last week's GDC, all of whom were required to sign strict non-disclosure agreements. A public reveal of the engine's capabilities is expected later in the year.