Unreal Engine 4 Looks All Kinds of Pretty on Mobile

Moore’s Law states that every two years the ability to render sick graphicz on mobile devices doubles. I read that in a book one time.

The folks at Epic Games (do they make games anymore?) apparently took the same high school reading class as mine, because their new “Rivalry” demo is running on a mobile processor. Specifically, it ran on Nvidia’s new Tegra K1 processor, using Google’s “Android Extension Pack.”

There’s a lot more technobabble where that came from, suffice it to say that Nvidia’s new processor is based on its desktop models, rather than the old tablet-specific stuff. That’s how you get pretty videos like the one above, featuring “characters” from Epic’s earlier “Samaritan” demo. According to said video, this is Unreal Engine 4 running on PC specs. From what little I can see, that seems believable enough and shows yet another example of how far mobile graphics have come.

It is quite pretty (look at those puddles!), however, the first thing I noticed was how very little happens. It’s well and good to show nice character models, but how might this run if, say, guns and explosions started popping off? I have to wonder.

That said, it does show off Tappy Chicken, which I guess is my favorite UE4 game by default since Fortnite continues to elude us.

Steven Strom

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Steven "The Future of Games Journalism" Strom plays entirely too much Dota 2. He sometimes plays games when he's not too busy writing about them and their place in our culture, and thinks maybe they're not just a fad after all.