Epic Games showcases Unreal Engine 4 on PlayStation 4 with Infiltrator demo

If you want to see how much eye candy the next-gen consoles are gonna be able to show off, Epic Games has released a new video demo of its upcoming Unreal Engine 4. As opposed to the earlier shown-off Elemental demo, this one—dubbed Infiltrator—uses a different lighting technique. Check out the demo:

The Elemental demo used something called the Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination lighting system, which gave spectacular lighting effects. Infiltrator uses a static global illumination technique for lighting, which seems to be less taxing on the hardware. Despite this, though, while it is a given that Unreal Engine 4 would look gorgeous on a decent PC, the PS4 isn’t a slouch either.

Epic had released a video earlier this month that ran the Elemental demo on a PlayStation 4. The video gives us a look at what the in-game graphics of games running on Unreal Engine 4 will be like. The lighting and particle effects have a large amount of detail. While such effects and details could be seen in pre-rendered videos, this is a huge step forward for in-game graphics. It’s possible next-gen games with AAA-quality graphics will feature destructible environments, much like the current-gen Frostbite 3 engine.

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The company last year explained how the Engine worked through a PDF. Cliff Bleszinski, the then head of Epic Games, had confirmed that the engine would début with the company’s upcoming PC-exclusive game, Fortnite. Epic unveiled Unreal Engine 4 with a live gameplay video of its tech demo, Elemental. The video had amazing lighting, which seems to be the focus of the newest iteration of the engine.

Unreal Engine 4 looks gorgeous even on the PS4

Epic Games had also confirmed that Fortnite will be released in 2013. According to the company, Fortnite’s gameplay revolves around players exploring, foraging and collaborating to build a structure by day, using scavenged materials “to quickly build and renovate structures of varying materials and complexity.” At night, players will work together “to defend their prized fortress from the forces of darkness.”

Unreal Engine has been one of the most popular and versatile game engines to be released so far. It has powered many games, with some of the more popular ones being the Gears of War series for the Xbox 360, the BioShock series, the Batman Arkham series, Borderlands 2 and DmC Devil May Cry.

Sony announced the PlayStation 4 back in February. The company has confirmed that an AMD-based x86 processor will be powering the console. It will have 8GB of unified high-speed memory and a “massive” hard drive. The new controller—dubbed the DualShock 4—will have a touch pad that will have a share button, a headphone jack and a light bar to identify players. The light bar also works much like the Move sensor through a 3D camera.