Epic Debuts Fancy New Unreal Engine Visuals

Always keen to push the graphics bar a little higher, Epic has debuted an Unreal Engine demo at the Game Developers Conference with a number of impressive new effects.
According to VG247’s breathless report, Epic’s Mark Rein summarised the visuals as “Our proposal for what the next generation of gaming is going to be.” Indeed, it’ll have to be next-gen, because the demo was running on three Nvidia GTX 580 graphics cards; not exactly your everyday household desktop set-up, and way beyond the capabilities of the current console crop.
Naturally the Unreal Engine 3 will be able to scale down its new effects when necessary, but to run in the quality shown at GDC we’re all going to need more juice.
Unfortunately, there are only still images of this technology available at present. Footage of the demo itself will probably emerge in the next few days.
From the pictures made available and the features reported, we can say that DirectX 11 features have been added to the Unreal Engine 3. The engine can now show billboard reflections in fancy detail and handle ‘bokeh’ depth of field (which, according to this thing I’ve just read, means “the aesthetic quality of blur” so .. err .. yes, ok.)
Look below for a cigarette smoking man and demo scenes that are trying to be Blade Runner so hard it almost hurts.