Next Unreal Engine will need a console 10 times more powerful than an Xbox 360
At least something that can handle 2.5 teraflops.
Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney geeked out at the DICE 2012 Summit this year by crystal ball-ing what the video game industry can expect in terms of visual effects in the future.
In his lengthy speech, he said that to run Unreal’s next engine, a system needs to be at least 10 times more powerful than an Xbox 360. The ‘Samaritan‘ demonstration of Unreal Engine 3.975 shown last year required 2.5 trillion floating point operations per second, or teraflops. The Xbox 360 can only do 0.25 teraflops.
This is of course, for games running at 1080p @30fps. To run the game with the same visual fiedilty but at a lower resolution, like 720p, the system needs produce at least 1.1 teraflops of power, or 4.4 times the power of the Xbox 360.
Sweeney also spoke about new technologies that possibly could be implemented with the engine, such as GPS, orientation sensors, Kinect capabilities, and even Siri. You can watch the entire presentation over at Gamespot.
Image credit: NeoGAF.
