‘Elemental’, showing the real time capabilities of Epic’s UE4, replaces Samaritan as NVIDIA’s go-to tech demo to wow an audience.
Previously only shown behind closed doors to a small number of developers and press, the Elemental Demo showcases the 4th generation of Epic’s Unreal Engine. Superseding Samaritan, the much-discussed UE3 demo which was used extensively in the launch of the NVIDIA GTX680 earlier this quarter, Elemental was run on a single GTX 680 and looks fantastic. An article posted by NVIDIA finally allows the public to see Elemental in all its glory.
The exact technical details of the demo haven’t yet been revealed, however some of the UE4 features are explained in an accompanying video. These include, but aren’t limited to:
* Realtime Dynamic Global Illumination
* Glossy Specular Reflection
* Fully Emissive Materials (can transmit and recieve light)
* Full Shadow and Lit subsurface scattering
* Fully Deferred Renderer
– Deferred decals, changing properties of other surfaces
* Dynamically lit particle system
* Direct and Indirect lighting on particles
* GPU Particles, i.e. extremely large numbers of particles + complex simulations of those particle interations
* Per-pixel lens flare
* Glossy Specular Reflection
* Fully Emissive Materials (can transmit and recieve light)
* Full Shadow and Lit subsurface scattering
* Fully Deferred Renderer
– Deferred decals, changing properties of other surfaces
* Dynamically lit particle system
* Direct and Indirect lighting on particles
* GPU Particles, i.e. extremely large numbers of particles + complex simulations of those particle interations
* Per-pixel lens flare
It seems likely that the demo makes extensive use of NVIDIA’s proprietary FXAA or TXAA anti-aliasing technologies which are believed to be substantially more efficient than traditional techniques.
The video also shows the power of the new editor for Unreal Engine 4: real time scene rendering within the editor, game state drop-in/drop-out and new powerful debugging tools appear to lead to a more satisfying developer experience.
More details of Elemental are coming soon to Geforce.co.uk, but in the mean time they have made available a couple of dozen unedited high-resolution screenshots of the real-time rendered demo.
