At the opening event of the Unreal Fest in Seattle, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, addressed the recent commercial failures of ambitious, citing a "generational change" in the gaming landscape as part of the reason for their failures. Epic Games seemingly wants to address this shift in gamer priorities by relying more on in-game social features, although there was also a strong emphasis on getting indie game developers to sign on to use the Unreal Engine and the Epic Games Store.

In the same presentation, Epic Games announced a new collaboration between the Epic Games Store and Unreal Engine that should make it easier and more affordable for small development teams to market and publish their games to Epic Games and other storefronts. The new launch program, called Launch Everywhere with Epic, reduces Epic's revenue cut for any games developed with Unreal Engine and published on the Epic Games Store before or at the same time as any other platforms. Epic also announced new "indie spaces" for indie developers to share knowledge and make industry connections.

Skydance New Media, helmed by award-winning writer and director Amy Hennig, and Marvel Games today shared new details on their upcoming narrative-driven action-adventure game, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. A new trailer gives fans a sneak peek into an original story that takes players on a WWII-era adventure with an ensemble of four heroes playable at different points in the game.

As the game's narrative unfolds, players will assume the role of four central characters: a young Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America; Azzuri, T'Challa's grandfather and the WWII-era Black Panther; Gabriel Jones, a U.S. soldier and member of the Howling Commandos; and Nanali, a Wakandan spy embedded in Occupied Paris.

The Walt Disney Company has announced a new collaborative venture with Epic Games—yesterday's press release outlined the creation of an upcoming "all-new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences." Epic's Fortnite appears to be the first port of call for an expanded roster of Disney-owned characters and locales (perhaps for seasonal and time limited events)—new interactive projects will emerge at later time: "(our) persistent universe will offer a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more. Players, gamers and fans will be able to create their own stories and experiences, express their fandom in a distinctly Disney way, and share content with each other in ways that they love. This will all be powered by Unreal Engine." Additionally, the press briefing mentions a big money transaction: "Disney will also invest $1.5 billion to acquire an equity stake in Epic Games alongside the multi-year project. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals."

The Walt Disney Company's Chief Executive Officer—Robert A. Iger—stated: "Our exciting new relationship with Epic Games will bring together Disney's beloved brands and franchises with the hugely popular Fortnite in a transformational new games and entertainment universe. This marks Disney's biggest entry ever into the world of games and offers significant opportunities for growth and expansion. We can't wait for fans to experience the Disney stories and worlds they love in groundbreaking new ways." Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO and Founder also chipped in with: "Disney was one of the first companies to believe in the potential of bringing their worlds together with ours in Fortnite, and they use Unreal Engine across their portfolio. Now we're collaborating on something entirely new to build a persistent, open and interoperable ecosystem that will bring together the Disney and Fortnite communities." Disney's introductory piece includes a teaser image that shows an overhead perspective of a Fortnite-esque digital theme park—several circular floating islands are dotted with well known franchise graphics and company logos. A 43-second video montage also presents similar content, with the narrated message: "Discover a place where magic is Epic." Fortnite is listed alongside Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and Disney IPs.

We're excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5.3 is now available. This release brings numerous wide-ranging improvements as we continue to expand UE5's functionality and potential for game developers and creators across industries. As well as enhancements to core rendering, developer iteration, and virtual production toolsets, we're introducing Experimental new rendering, animation, and simulation features to give you the opportunity to test extended creative workflows inside UE5—reducing the need to round-trip with external applications.

Refinements to core UE5 rendering features
With this release, we've continued to refine all core UE5 rendering features to address our ongoing goal of making it easier for developers to leverage them at higher quality in games running at 60 FPS on next-gen consoles; the improvements also offer higher-quality results and enhanced performance for linear content creators. Specifically, Nanite has faster performance for masked materials, including foliage, and can represent a greater range of surfaces due to the new Explicit Tangents option, while Lumen with Hardware Ray Tracing has expanded capabilities that include multiple reflection bounces, and delivers faster performance on consoles. Other areas with notable advancements include Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM)—which is now Production-Ready—Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Hair Grooms, Path Tracing, and Substrate.

Electronic Arts and Ascendant Studios have delayed its upcoming first-person FPS Immortals of Aveum to August 22nd. As detailed by Ascendant Studios, the game will be pushed back to August 22nd, in order to further polish the game and optimize the performance on all platforms. In case you missed it earlier, Immortals of Aveum is a fantasy first-person magic shooter that will put the player into role of Jak, an Immortal capable of using all three colors of magic.

Originally scheduled to launch on July 20th, Immortals of Aveum raised a lot of interest as it will be the first Unreal Engine 5.1 game. The game also looks pretty good, despite high PC system requirements, which included either a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB graphics card to run the game at 1440p at 60 FPS, and that is with medium to high game settings.

Dramatic Labs answers your questions: "Where have we been? We know we've been quiet at times since we announced Star Trek: Resurgence at The Game Awards in December… 2021. You can rest assured we never stopped working on the game, but obviously we all expected it to be released by now. So why the delays? The short answer is because we are a relatively small development team, making a pretty big game, and that has been keeping us very busy! As you might know, we had initially hoped to have the game out in "Spring 2022," but it is now "Spring 2023."

What happened? Honestly, our initial target was just too aggressive. We were very excited to get Star Trek: Resurgence to everyone as fast as we could, but this is our first game as Dramatic Labs, and our first game built with the Unreal Engine. And along the way it became clear the game wouldn't be what we wanted if we kept that release window. We considered trying to hit the holiday season for 2022, but we decided that, if we were going to change the date, we should do it to make the best game we could. Not to meet some arbitrary marketing timeline. That's why we reset for a Spring 2023 release and now we're excited to finally announce a date: May 23, 2023!

Hexworks and CI Games have shown off their upcoming RPG, Lords of the Fallen, as part of the State of Unreal GDC Showcase. The trailer demonstrates the team's ambitions and the use of Unreal Engine 5 has allowed them "to create the most immersive game experience possible". The game's character customization system is a cumulation of UE5 generated geometry and 3D scans taken from real life human models. The development team states that this allows players to "create unique faces and bodies by dynamically morphing between a huge range of shapes before finessing the finer details."

Unreal Engine 5's Lumen Global Illumination has been put to good use by the team - the game's complex and rich environments are lit in dramatic and atmospheric fashion, all in real time, with an added layer of technical accomplishment due to the player being able to swap between two parallel worlds. Hexworks devised its own custom toolset to enable the seamless shift from Axiom, the realm of the living, to Umbral, the realm of the dead: "This means our artists and designers can ensure these worlds feel intrinsically linked, like two sides of the same coin... even if one side is decidedly more horrific than the other."

Ninja Theory has released a new trailer for its upcoming Senua's Saga: Hellblade II game, which was a part of Epic's State of Unreal showcase from GDC 2023. The new trailer focuses on Senua and character rendering rather than the game itself but at least we get an idea what to expect from the game when it comes out.

As you would have guessed, the game is developed on the Unreal Engine, and facial animation is definitely looking impressive. Previously, Ninja Theory revealed a bit of the gameplay at The Game Awards last year, and we certainly expect more from Microsoft at this year's Xbox Games Showcase on June 11th.

Powerful AI technologies are making a massive impact in 3D content creation and game development. Whether creating realistic characters that show emotion or turning simple texts into imagery, AI tools are becoming fundamental to developer workflows - and this is just the start. At NVIDIA GTC and the Game Developers Conference (GDC), learn how the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for creating and operating metaverse applications is expanding with new Connectors and generative AI services for game developers.

Part of the excitement around generative AI is because of its ability to capture the creator's intent. The technology learns the underlying patterns and structures of data, and uses that to generate new content, such as images, audio, code, text, 3D models and more. Announced today, the NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud services enable users to build, refine and operate custom large language models (LLMs) and generative AI trained with their proprietary data for their domain-specific tasks. And through NVIDIA Omniverse, developers can get their first taste of using generative AI technology to enhance game creation and accelerate development pipelines with the Omniverse Audio2Face app.

Acer will be participating in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2023 held from March 20-24 in San Francisco to share the latest innovations of its industry-leading SpatialLabs experience. It combines advanced eye-tracking cameras, a stereoscopic 3D display and stereo rendering capabilities to deliver immersive 3D experiences without the need for specialized glasses. With a click of a button, 2D visuals seem to pop out of their screens, giving designers, marketers, and other professionals a unique way of interacting with their creations in 3D views.

SpatialLabs TrueGame
Following its launch in 2021, Acer took it up a notch by bringing its glasses-free stereoscopic 3D technology to the world of gaming through the SpatialLabs TrueGame application. With a Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition laptop, or a SpatialLabs View display paired with a PC, users can enjoy the supported titles in their true 3D form, delivering immersive gaming experiences as envisioned by their developers. This is possible because games are mostly created with a three-dimensional world in mind as developers include information about depth in each scene and object they build. SpatialLabs leverages this already-existing information in order to present the games in stereoscopic 3D. A dedicated pre-configured profile is now available for each game title, among the 70+ modern and classic titles on launch, to offer players a seamless experience with their favorite games. More profiles for additional titles will be added on a continuous basis moving forward.

Thanks to the attribution of Puget Systems, we have a preview of Intel's latest Xeon W-3400 and Xeon W-2400 workstation processors based on Sapphire Rapids core technology. Delivering up to 56 cores and 112 threads, these CPUs are paired with up to eight TeraBytes of eight-channel DDR5-4800 memory. For expansion, they offer up to 112 PCIe 5.0 lanes come with up to 350 Watt TDP; some models are unlocked for overclocking. This interesting HEDT family for workstation usage comes at a premium with an MSRP of $5,889 for the top-end SKU, and motherboard prices are also on the pricey side. However, all of this should come as no surprise given the expected performance professionals expect from these chips. Puget Systems has published test results that include: Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine, Cinebench R23.2, Blender, and V-Ray. Note that Puget Systems said that: "While this post has been an interesting preview of the new Xeon processors, there is still a TON of testing we want to do. The optimizations Intel is working on is of course at the top, but there are several other topics we are highly interested in." So we expect better numbers in the future.Below, you can see the comparison with AMD's competing Threadripper Pro HEDT SKUs, along with power usage using different Windows OS power profiles:

Intel released the XeSS Unreal Engine plugin, letting game developers integrate the performance enhancement technology with their Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 powered games, simulators, and 3D visualization applications. The plugin lets Unreal Engine take advantage of XeSS not just on Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, where they benefit from the accelerated XMX code-path; but also AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, where the technology takes advantage of the slower yet functional DP4a code-path. XeSS is technically a second-generation super-resolution technology that Intel claims is on-par with AMD FSR 2.x and NVIDIA DLSS 2. Integrating it is as straightforward as adding AMD FSR support. Those interested can grab the plugin from the GitHub source link, below.

AMD released the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) plugin for Unreal Engine 4, allowing game developers to integrate the performance enhancement technology with their games. A competing technology to NVIDIA DLSS, FSR lets gamers improve frame-rates of their games by trading off quality. At the higher "Quality" presets, this quality loss is supposed to be practically unnoticeable, but with significant improvements to frame-rates. We detailed how the technology works in our article that gets under its hood and evaluates performance. At its launch, AMD listed out a broad list of launch partners for the technology, but Unreal was a notable absentee. Over the following months, AMD appears to have worked toward bringing the tech to even UE4. The plugin is being distributed through AMD's GPUOpen portal.

DOWNLOAD: AMD FSR Plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Today Epic Games announced that it completed a $1 billion round of funding, which will allow the company to support future growth opportunities. Epic's equity valuation is now $28.7 billion.

This round includes an additional $200M strategic investment from Sony Group Corporation, which builds on the already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces their shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services. Other investment partners include Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital. Epic continues to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and CEO Tim Sweeney remains the controlling shareholder of the company.

Epic Games has just recently unveiled its Unreal Engine version 5, which was demonstrated on next-generation PlayStation 5 console. Showing off some impressive details, Epic Games has managed to use all of the power available to them from the new hardware in the PS5 console. Rocking a custom APU from AMD, the PS5 console has 10.28 TeraFLOPs of computing power, which is paired with a fast NVMe SSD. Such a combination allows for the impressive demo we have seen just a few days ago.

However, if you wonder what equivalent PC hardware would you need to run the demo on, World Today News has concluded that you would need at least to have NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card to run a demo if you could. The RTX 2070S GPU has 9 TeraFLOPs of computing power, and the demonstration would "run pretty good" on that GPU. By the time first Unreal Engine 5 based games come out, next-generation graphics cards should already be available and you wouldn't need to worry if you are getting an upgrade. For the people owning RTX 2070S and faster, they should be good to go for when games based on Unreal Engine 5 hit the market.

AMD today announced its Radeon Pro VII professional graphics card targeting 3D artists, engineering professionals, broadcast media professionals, and HPC researchers. The card is based on AMD's "Vega 20" multi-chip module that incorporates a 7 nm (TSMC N7) GPU die, along with a 4096-bit wide HBM2 memory interface, and four memory stacks adding up to 16 GB of video memory. The GPU die is configured with 3,840 stream processors across 60 compute units, 240 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The card is built in a workstation-optimized add-on card form-factor (rear-facing power connectors and lateral-blower cooling solution).

What separates the Radeon Pro VII from last year's Radeon VII is full double precision floating point support, which is 1:2 FP32 throughput compared to the Radeon VII, which is locked to 1:4 FP32. Specifically, the Radeon Pro VII offers 6.55 TFLOPs double-precision floating point performance (vs. 3.36 TFLOPs on the Radeon VII). Another major difference is the physical Infinity Fabric bridge interface, which lets you pair up to two of these cards in a multi-GPU setup to double the memory capacity, to 32 GB. Each GPU has two Infinity Fabric links, running at 1333 MHz, with a per-direction bandwidth of 42 GB/s. This brings the total bidirectional bandwidth to a whopping 168 GB/s—more than twice the PCIe 4.0 x16 limit of 64 GB/s.

Nightdive Studios, who are developing a remake of Looking Glass Technologies' famous System Shock, have just released an 87-minute gameplay showcase for the remade version of the game. In it, you'll get to take a look into the combat system, inventory, art and graphics design for the game (whether or not it stays true to your memory of the original is up to you, though).

The game has gone through a sort of development hell, when after garnering more than $1.4 million in crowdfunding, it was announced that the game was being put on hold. That decision was motivated by the developers' arguably overzealous take on the System Shock game, which had them continually build into the core ideas of the game - essentially rendering it as more of a heavily-inspired spiritual successor than the remake they originally envisioned. Changing game development engines from unity to Unreal was also part of the reason for the games' development delay. The game is expected to launch this year, though no specifics on exactly when have been made available. Catch the video after the break.

Epic Games, as part of the company's $100 million Epic MegaGrants program, is awarding the Blender Foundation $1.2 million in cash to further the success of Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite that supports the full range of tools empowering artists to create 3D graphics, animation, special effects or games.

The Epic MegaGrants initiative is designed to assist game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.

Not all news coming from EPIC covers its EPIC Games Store - though according to the relative attention they've been garnering with the constant scooping up of PC timed exclusives, perhaps it should. This piece of news, alas, covers the company's unreal Engine, which has been one of the hallmarks in games development for a while now, being used for a number of disparate games such as the gears of War games, or even a relatively obscure, Xbox 360 exclusive title, Lost Odyssey. At GDC 2019, EPIC showcased version 4.23 of its Unreal Engine, with particular attention to its improved destruction and physics engine, which they've aptly named "Chaos".

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

3DFX is a well-known name for most in our community, I'd wager (I don't have the data to back me up on that, but bare with me). The company is one of the highest-profile defunct companies that vied for a place in the desktop, high-performance GPU space back in the day, and brought its guns bearing on NVIDIA and then ATI. The Rampage was the last GPU ever developed by the company, and looked to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce3. That never saw the light of day, though, with the company shutting its doors before development became viable for market release.

DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.

Microsoft today announced an extension to its DirectX 12 API with DirectX Raytracing, which provides components designed to make real-time ray-tracing easier to implement, and uses Compute Shaders under the hood, for wide graphics card compatibility. NVIDIA feels that their "Volta" graphics architecture, has enough computational power on tap, to make real-time ray-tracing available to the masses. The company has hence collaborated with Microsoft to develop the NVIDIA RTX technology, as an interoperative part of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, along with a few turnkey effects, which will be made available through the company's next-generation GameWorks SDK program, under GameWorks Ray Tracing, as a ray-tracing denoiser module for the API.

Real-time ray-tracing has for long been regarded as a silver-bullet to get lifelike lighting, reflections, and shadows right. Ray-tracing is already big in the real-estate industry, for showcasing photorealistic interactive renderings of property under development, but has stayed away from gaming, that tends to be more intense, with larger scenes, more objects, and rapid camera movements. Movies with big production budgets use pre-rendered ray-tracing farms to render each frame. Movies have, hence, used ray-traced visual-effects for years now, since it's not interactive content, and its studios are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money to painstakingly render each frame using hundreds of rays per pixel.

Tim Sweeney, a lead developer with Epic Games, behind the industry-leading Unreal game engine, once again raised concerns in a recent interview with print-magazine "Edge," that Microsoft is systematically killing digital distribution platform Steam, by deliberately eroding the reliability and longevity of the Win32 programming interface for PC versions of Windows, in favor of its UWP (universal Windows platform), through updates to the OS.

Microsoft, Sweeney argues, is carefully avoiding big changes to the way third-party software is distributed and used on Windows, but is definitely seen to be taking small strategic steps, "sneaky maneuvers," that could lead to Windows Store either monopolizing all third-party software distribution on the platform, or worse, making it the only way you can get third-party apps. The rising reliability issues affecting Steam, a Win32 API-based platform that distributes Win32 software, Sweeney claims are telltale signs of that dark future of the PC platform. Microsoft's biggest argument in favor of UWP is that software is inherently more secure, since it's sandboxed (covered in abstraction layers and virtualized by the OS) even further.

Valve announces a number of product and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. "We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months," said Gabe Newell, Valve's president. "With these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum."

Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend your Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

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