Take Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Tech Demo for a Spin

[btarunr]

Wish you could run one of those awesome Unreal Engine 4 tech demos on your own hardware instead of watching its lossy, pixellated video-grabs on YouTube? Well, now you can. Epic's "Elemental" tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 cropped up on the web, and we wasted no time in re-hosting it for you. The demo doesn't appear to be a public release, but something developers put together for demos to be run by Epic and its partners, only. To begin with, it doesn't come with an installer. You have to extract its files into a folder, and manually edit its settings INI file to specify resolution, window behaviour, and other settings. You then have to install VC++ 2013 runtime if you don't already have it (the redistributables are included in the archive), and then run the demo from the relevant batch file. Unreal included both 32-bit and 64-bit executables. When you're done drooling rainbows at the demo, only an Alt+F4 closes the thing down (there's no in-demo UI). There's no internal benchmark, and you're left to use third-party frame-rate loggers. These little issues aside, the demo sure makes Unreal Engine 4 look promising. We also added a collection of five other tech-demos for your viewing pleasure.



DOWNLOAD: Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo (RAR archive) | Unreal Engine 4 Five Tech Demos

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ZetZet]

People say this demo was more impressive before release?
Yeah so I just ran it, does not look that great for a tech demo.

 

[dj-electric]

+1

It looks ok, it runs good, of course.
But dear lord, texture quality is horrible.

 

[TheHunter]

People say this demo was more impressive before release?
Yeah so I just ran it, does not look that great for a tech demo.

Yep, its a PS4 version with extra PC details, smoke, debri, particles..

Lighting, dynamic shadows and textures took a small dump..

 

[Chitz]

I really really wish if there will be a Samaritan Demo available soon ^^

 

[FrustratedGarrett]

Not impressed! They're using too much blur and the texture quality is sub par. After all these years, no real improvements have been made to both the geometry and clarity of modern graphics in video games.

 

[_larry]

Not impressed! They're using too much blur and the texture quality is sub par. After all these years, no real improvements have been made to both the geometry and clarity of modern graphics in video games.

Yeah, blur and other post-process effects annoy the hell out of me. As for the geometry, the consoles have and will be behind for some time. A lot of dx11 games on PC use tessellation that significantly improves the geometry of character models and environment textures. It requires a lot of processing power though. More than the "next-gen" consoles can properly dish out. That combined with proper anti-aliasing is near impossible on consoles.

 

[FrustratedGarrett]

Yeah, blur and other post-process effects annoy the hell out of me. As for the geometry, the consoles have and will be behind for some time. A lot of dx11 games on PC use tessellation that significantly improves the geometry of character models and environment textures. It requires a lot of processing power though. More than the "next-gen" consoles can properly dish out. That combined with proper anti-aliasing is near impossible on consoles.

I think the problem is inherently in the Direct3D API. It's the API that translates all the draw calls produced by the game engine to low-level threads and loads them onto GPU RAM. So it's the API that does the actual drawing (and memory/thread management). The images are too cartoonish too bland and unrealistic, heck, they look like dough in Battlefield 4 and Metro.

The PS4 has decent hardware. They could've done a lot better had they gone with a discreet 7970 GPU for graphics processing and a Kaveri class APU for both AI and simulation/physics processing, which would've made things a lot better. Still, the PS4 can output some decent graphics and so alright simulation. Deep Down look nice and has much better physics and destruction than Metro, a PC exclusive.

 

[progste]

the smoke and the embers are the only impressive part, everything else is painfully average, especially the solid physics (or should i say physx)

Deep Down look nice and has much better physics and destruction than Metro, a PC exclusive.

don't judge the game until it's out, they often show a better version in the trailers, then downgrade lighting and other details to make it playable

 

[birdie]

Unfortunately this demo doesn't look anywhere near what the original demo looked like.

Effects are different (worse), there are fewer particles, there's no SVOGI.

And there's a mistake in the news: "Unreal included both 32-bit and 64-bit executables." Obviously you're talking about Epic.

 

[Hilux SSRG]

Epic should work on a new Unreal Tournament with this tech.

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

Meh. Looks just like a heavily modded Unreal Engine 3.0.. We will be stuck with this kind of graphics for the next decade I guess.