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[This feature was published in the September 2013 edition of Develop magazine, which is available through your browser and on iPad.]
At SIGGRAPH 2013, Epic Games revealed an Unreal Engine 4 PC desktop gaming experience running on Nvidia’s next-generation mobile processor, codenamed Project Logan.
What’s exciting about this is that Nvidia’s new mobile graphics technology is built on Kepler graphics architecture, which is found in its latest generation of PC GPUs.
It’s the same Kepler architecture on top of which Epic has created high-end Unreal Engine 4 PC demonstrations – such as Elemental and Infiltrator – which have taken advantage of more than 2.5 teraflops of computing performance.
In addition, Kepler supports the OpenGL 4.4 feature set, which brings to mobile devices the same high-end graphics hardware capabilities exposed via DirectX 11 on PC games and on next-generation consoles.
More than ever before, developers can create high-end games and ship them across multiple platforms on a wide variety of devices, including tablet, smartphone, Windows, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Nvidia’s achievements open up the mobile front of this strategy for anyone using the latest Unreal Engine technology.
While Unreal Engine 3 already powers hundreds of high-quality games, from PC and console to mobile, Unreal Engine 4 has been reimagined for the future of game development, with Epic supporting developers on an entirely new level across major platforms with its most powerful and scalable toolset to date.
This bridges the gap between highly desirable PC game experiences and what Epic and Nvidia are already achieving on mobile devices with Unreal Engine 4 and Logan. Mobile games soon will be built using the same architecture as PC games, following the latest standards, and using the most powerful, scalable tools.
SHEDDING NEW LIGHT ON SHADING
In other SIGGRAPH news, Epic’s senior graphics programmer Brian Karis helped present a course entitled ‘Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice’, looking at the importance and craft of this subject in modern games and film production, with developers from 2K Games, Autodesk, Pixar Animation Studios, Ready at Dawn Studios, Sony Picture Imageworks, Treyarch Studios, and Ubisoft Entertainment.
The slides and course notes, ‘Real Shading in Unreal Engine 4’, are available at unrealengine.com/resources.
BROADCASTING THE FUTURE OF GAMES
Last but not least, Epic has launched a new channel at twitch.tv/unrealengine to provide an additional resource for anyone interested in Unreal Engine technology.
Epic’s new home on Twitch will be host to live tutorials, tools walkthroughs, new feature demos, and much more.
Zak Parrish, senior technical writer at Epic and co-author of the award-winning Mastering Unreal Technology series of books, has already hosted programs including ‘UDK: An Introduction to Level Streaming’ and ‘Creating Mobile Games With UDK’.
Archived livestreams are available on Epic’s Twitch channel, and also at www.youtube.com/unrealengine.
To read all of Develop’s Unreal Diaries, visit our archive
