Epic Games and Apple are engaged in an ugly legal battle over Epic's decision to add an in-app payment system for "Fortnite," in violation of Apple's terms. All in-game micro-transactions are expected to be routed through the App Store. Apple essentially de-platformed Epic Games, and "Fortnite," which would have far-reaching implications including restrictions on third-party games using the Unreal Engine. On Monday, Epic Games got a partial and temporary relief against Apple's action, in the form of a temporary restraining order which prevents Apple from terminating the developer accounts of Epic Games, and restricting the use of Unreal Engine by game developers on Apple platforms.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hearing the matter, however ruled that Apple isn't required to restore "Fortnite," which it banned after Epic Games added its in-game payments system that stepped on Apple's toes. Epic Games in its prayer to the Court argued that Apple's actions brought "irreparable harm" to the company. The Court disagreed. "The Court finds that with respect to Epic Games' motion as to its games, including Fortnite, Epic Games has not yet demonstrated irreparable harm. The current predicament appears of its own making." She argued that Epic Games "strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple."

In the ongoing turf war between Epic Games and Apple, the game and engine development company has now signed a powerful ally to its side: Microsoft. In an announcement via Twitter, XBOX vice president Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft had filed a statement in support of Epic's lawsuit against Apple - specifically, regarding the maintenance of Unreal Engine resources, tools, and developer credentials in the Apple store. This comes weeks after the battle royale between Apple and Epic begun, and after Epic started a social media and industry-wide call for support among consumers and corporations alike.

While the merits on Epic's initial move and subsequent lawsuit against Apple may be up for debate, and it's likely that any court of law will say that Epic clearly intended to breach contract terms they had already accepted when distributing Fortnite through the Apple Store, this second one has a much higher amount of O2 to breathe. Apple terminating the Unreal Engine affiliation with its store and development capabilities can potentially send a ripple effect throughout the entire games industry, whether in already-shipped games, currently in development ones, or future development intentions. That Microsoft themselves backed Epic on this particular issue goes to show just how wide a net this conflict is escalating towards.

The epic (ahem) battle between Epic Games and Apple is becoming increasingly nastier, as Apple has communicated to the game and game engine developers that it plans on terminating all of Epic developer accounts on its ecosystem (both on iOS or MacOS) by August 28th. If done, this would impede not only Epic from developing for these systems, but also would impact any and all companies that actually employ the Unreal Engine in their development process, be it final or merely as a toolbox. It's case to say that Apple has its finger firmly set on the big, red button.

This move from Apple comes in wake of the calculated feud initiated by Epic Games last week with both Google and Apple. What some may have failed to see is that the Epic Games move was a coordinated, well-thought-out one, in that the company knew - or thought they knew - the full ramifications of what they were setting in motion. Epic Games, with its newfound budget and clout, is looking to become a banner for developers, spearheading a charge that is looking to brunt the walled garden approach. In fact, the company is even looking to form a "coalition of Apple critics", and is looking for companies to join its bandwagon in fighting against the Apple walled-garden and middle-man approach to software distribution.

Epic Games today announced a $1.78 billion round of funding consisting of primary capital and secondary purchases from employee equity holders. Epic's post-money equity valuation is now $17.3 billion.

This round includes a previously announced $250 million strategic investment from Sony Corporation. Additional investment partners include Baillie Gifford, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and David Tepper. Existing investors KKR and Smash Ventures also added to their 2018 investment. Following the closing of the funding round Epic will continue to have only a single class of common stock outstanding and will remain controlled by its founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney.

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.

Epic Games has just released a trailer for version 5 of their industry/acclaimed Unreal Engine. Dubbed "Lumen in the Land of Nanite", the demo they've shared is nothing short of mindblowing when it comes to the amount of environment and character detail. Unreal Engine 5 will feature a new geometry processing engine Epic is calling Nanite, which the company promises will virtually eliminate polygon budgets for developers, with automatic stream and scaling, thus eliminating the need to develop LOD levels for particular assets. Another addition, and an as impressive one, is the Lumen global illumination engine, which will save developers the need to manually bake lightmaps accounting for every little change in a scene's lighting - the global illumination system makes these changes in lighting conditions as seamless and integrated as they can be. This among other features already introduced with version 4.25 such as Niagara VFX and Chaos destruction systems.

Unreal Engine 5 is pegged for an early 2021 release; Epic Games has already announced they will be porting their popular Fortnite videogame into the engine, which makes sense, considering it's being particularly optimized for PC and next-generation consoles. These will become the backbone of games development - and an important source of Epic's Fortnite revenue stream. Take a look at the trailer after the break - and remember this was all running real-time in a PlayStation 5 console.

The folks over at Dekogon Studios, a game art outsourcing studio, have published on their ArtStation account some Unreal Engine 4 renders to showcase their creative vision and technological mastering of Epic's acclaimed engine. Being one of the more commonly used game development engines due to its rendering quality, ease of use and pipeline flexibility, Unreal Engine is one of the benchmarks for visual quality in the gaming world. These renders from Dekogon Studios using the latest version of Unreal Engine and employing raytracing are absolutely beautiful and incredibly, richly detailed.

While we don't know how many frames per second a modern graphics card could generate at this level of detail (or if it would take seconds to generate a single frame), one can always dream of gaming in environments with the same quality as the showcased basketball court or science classroom (FEAR 2, anyone?). Other environments are slightly less impressive and seem to have taken slightly less attention, but I myself can pretty much see this level of detail on my next Life is Strange or Detroit: Become Human. So, games development studios... Make it happen, please! Look after the break for some videos showcasing these beautiful environments.

GSC Game World announced the second chapter and latest entry to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The survival horror FPS made its debut in 2007 at a time when PC graphics were taking a technological leap. The Kiev-based game studio since dished out the "Clear Sky" prequel and "Call of Pripyat" sequel last decade, but has since been a recluse to the AAA gaming scene. The development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 appears to be already underway. The game will leverage Unreal Engine, and there's a fairly high possibility of it being Epic Games Store exclusive given its sweet revenue-sharing model that directs 88% of the sales to the game publisher.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developers (or at least a Twitter handle claiming to represent them), posted two key tweets. One shows a teaser screenshot of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in development; and another with a message from the developers to fans of the game franchise. "The second chapter of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. saga will be our most ambitious game so far. It will live to the legendary legacy," the statement reads. The developers didn't, however, state any timelines. "Consider it (the teaser screenshot and announcement) our humble present, with more to come in 2020," the statement concludes.

FEMFX is a multithreaded CPU library for deformable material physics, using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Solid objects are represented as a mesh of tetrahedral elements, and each element has material parameters that control stiffness, how volume changes with deformation, and stress limits where fracture or plastic (permanent) deformation occur. The model supports a wide range of materials and interactions between materials. We intend for these features to complement rather than replace traditional rigid body physics. The system is designed with the following considerations:

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.

If you've heard of Teslasuit, you've likely felt some sort of interest towards it. As well you should: the ideal of a full body suit with haptic feedback for VR experiences is enough for some of us - at least those with the hero, "I'll never get hit by any bullet" complex. Add to the full body haptic feedback capabilities such as full body motion tracking embedded into the suit, as well as localized temperature controls for transmitting heat and cold sensations, and... There's also biometric feedback built in for usage patterns and engagement ratio, to aid developers in their data collecting. Well, can I hear Ready Player One, anyone?

The company behind the Tesla suit have just announced that their product won the Red Dot: Best of the Best, the top distinction in the competition. It is granted for groundbreaking design and goes to the best products in a category. The Teslasuit is now available for distribution as a development kit, and features dedicated software, documentation, API integration with Unreal Engine, Unity, and Motion Builder.

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.

With more and more companies creating their very own digital storefronts in the PC gaming space, it was only a matter of time until Epic Games threw their hat into the ring. With an announcement posted today, by Tim Sweeney the Epic Games store is now officially a reality. The new digital storefront will be made available for PC and Mac to start with, while other platforms will be added throughout 2019. In regards to games available on the platform, Epic will offer Fortnite alongside a set of hand-curated titles at launch. What those games might be is currently unknown.

Delivering a shot across the bow at Steam and their 30% revenue cut, Epic's game store will instead only take 12%, resulting in developers earning 88% of sales revenue. If they are using Unreal Engine the 5% engine royalty will be waived by Epic and instead is factored into their original 12% take. Putting that into perspective, an Unreal Engine based game released on Steam currently gives developers only 65% of the revenue with Steam earning 30% and Epic 5% due to engine royalties. Going from 65% to 88% is a significant increase in earnings, and it doesn't matter what game engine a developer uses, the revenue split will remain the same. This should leave developers quite happy since they are not limited by game engine choice and Epic benefits from a vastly increased selection of titles they can offer in their digital store.

HaptX today announced that they're opening availability of development kits for their HaptX haptic feedback VR Gloves. The development kits include a pair of HaptX gloves - each featuring 130 tactile actuators that provide realistic touch across the hand and fingertips, with full tactile displacement of objects, size, and weight feedback. Built with HaptX's patented microfluidic technology, HaptX Gloves also deliver powerful force feedback and industry-leading motion tracking with sub-millimeter precision.

The HaptX gloves and accompanying software are already supported in unity and Unreal Engine 4 - two of the most widespread games development engines - which should allow for increased chances of market integration towards VR experiences. Bringing the physical to the visual is the motto here, and there's a world of potential to be achieved.

Earlier in January of this year, PUBG Corp threw a lawsuit at Epic Games, looking to assert its rights to the "Battle Royale" mode that game was mimicking from the original Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. It now seems that PUBG Corp has decided to throw in the towel over its pursuit of Epic Games' Fortnite as a "straight copy" of its battle royale mode - a move that came only after Fortnite had eclipsed PUBG Corp's game in concurrent players and revenue generation.

Perhaps at least part of this issue was dealt with by Chinese giant Tencent, which owns part of Bluehole Inc (PUBG Corp's parent company) and part of Epic Games - it hurts investors when two of their pots are throwing dirt at each other. Another part of the equation - and the most likely, considering the amount of time the lawsuit survived in court - pertains to how PUBG makes use of EPIC Games' Unreal Engine. I'd say it's at least slightly important to keep a good relationship with such a company.

EPIC delivered their "The State of Unreal" presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week (which had a great deal much time devoted to raytracing technologies). EPIC Games has been at the forefront of graphics development for some years now. Their engines (alongside a few other key players in the industry) routinely push the boundaries of graphical fidelity. And naturally, something would be amiss if they weren't jumping on the raytracing bandwagon as well with some of the most impressive proof of concept videos I've ever seen in real-time generated graphics. The company took their time, then, to unveil their artistic interpretations of real-time ray tracing, motion capture and real-time facial animation mapping. Cue many videos, after the break.

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.

At SOLIDWORKS World, HP today announced it will power its bestselling performance workstation, the HP Z4, with a choice of Intel Xeon or Core X processors and support dual extreme graphics. HP's latest technology was showcased at SOLIDWORKS World, where it also unveiled its low-cost, full-color 3D printers -- highlighting the company's comprehensive end-to-end solutions for product developers.

"The revamped Z4 workstation, along with our latest HP Windows Mixed Reality Headset and new customer-friendly VR solutions and services, will transform the way products across industries are developed," said Xavier Garcia, vice president and general manager, Z Workstations, HP Inc. "Over the past year, HP has launched the world's most powerful workstation, the most powerful detachable PC and the first-ever professional VR backpack. Today's news reflects our focus on continuously raising the bar with a portfolio of workstations and VR capabilities that will enable amazing new experiences and define the future of computing."

EPIC Games has made an investment that was both likely and unlikely: the acquisition of Cloudgine, a software company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that specializes in real-time cloud computing technologies. The company's name has appeared associated with Microsoft's now almost infamous Crackdown 3 project for the Xbox One console, which has been met with delays after delays. The sum for the acquisition hasn't been announced, though EPIC was forthcoming with the intention: they aim to integrate Cloudgine's software and cloud computing solutions on their Unreal engine. The full EPIC press release follows.

AMD today unveiled its big annual driver releases for its consumer-graphics Radeon line, and the professional-graphics Radeon Pro and FirePro lines. The BAR (big annual release) for the latter is titled AMD Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1 WHQL, and introduces a slew of new features that add value to the company's FirePro and Radeon Pro graphics cards. Since its 2016 BAR (Radeon Pro Crimson ReLive), the company's regular driver updates for enterprises achieved a predictable cadence of the 2nd Wednesday of the 2nd month of each quarter, capped off with a big annual release in December, besides prioritized 24x7 support. This, AMD claims, has been well received by its customers.

With the Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition, AMD is expanding its software in four key directions - Pro Render, Pro Settings, New Driver Options, and Virtualization. It also chronicles driver releases over 2017 have gradually increased performance levels by up to 16 percent compared to last year's big annual release. AMD expanded the feature-set of ProRender, its in-house and highly modular 3D rendering engine for CAD designers and 3D artists, including its support for Maxon Cinema 4D; interactive viewport de-noising for Blender; a new Game Engine Importer extension that can import geometry and materials in real-time from SolidWorks to Unreal Engine; accelerating VR ports of popular games and professional 3D scenes; and a set of additional features such as PBR Shader for Blender. The drivers also add macOS support for Maya and Blender, which will be implemented "soon," along with support for 2018 releases of 3DSMax and Maya.

NVIDIA, Ansel, a framework for doing real-time screenshot filters and photographic effects, has seen the release of a public SDK and a few developer plugins to boot. Unreal Engine and Unity have both gained plugins for the technology, and the tech is reportedly coming to Amazon's Lumberyard engine as well. This should most assuredly aid in the adoption of the technology, as well as open it up to new markets where it was previous unavailable, such as indie game development. The public SDK is presently available for download from NVIDIA directly at developer.nvidia.com/ansel

At its WX call, AMD focused on shifts in creativity from traditional design flows such as Solidworks, Adobe and Autodesk towards game engines as solutions for design visualization (Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, or Autodesk's own Stingray platform), which signal changes in the creator ecosystem. Thanks to globalization, the Internet, and the available wealth of knowledge one can access through it, the line between amateurs and professionals is becoming more and more blurred. Now, those who would once be called amateurs are also using professional tools, and AMD plans to be at the forefront of technologies empowering creators to deliver their vision.

Radeon PRO serves to give creators more flexible and powerful solutions, leveraging open-source resources and centering the ecosystem back on creators and the tools they choose to use, with focused support on VR. As such, AMD is giving them the tools they need, by introducing three new products featuring the Polaris architecture, including 3 year standard + 7 year free extended warranty (including components such as the PCB itself, the PCI-Express slot, and the heatsinks), with AMD taking that extra 7 years as company commitment towards the quality of their products. Those three products are the WX4100, the WX5100, and the WX7100, and have planned, staggered availability throughout November.

The official discussion board for Epic Games, frequented by developers and gamers of Unreal Engine, "Unreal Tournament," and soon "Paragon," was hacked, exposing dates of birth, IP addresses, registration dates, registration e-mail addresses, and allegedly passwords, of over 800,000 users, reports The Hacker News. The hackers reportedly got their hands on the data by exploiting a vulnerability in the outdated version of vBulletin that Epic Games uses.

Epic Games, however, denies that the hackers got their hands on passwords. "We believe a recent Unreal Engine and Unreal Tournament forum compromise revealed email addresses and other data entered into the forums, but no passwords in any form, neither salted, hashed, nor plaintext," the company stated. ZDNet reports that a larger portion of the vBulletin database, which includes user posts and private-messages, could also have been stolen.

From the creators of Rise of the Triad and legendary game maker 3D Realms comes Bombshell, an action role-playing game, now included FREE with EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN X, 980 Ti, 980, 970, 960, and 950 graphics cards for a limited time.

Bomb disposal technician turned mercenary for hire, Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison must strong-arm her way across 4 planets in an Unreal Engine-powered galactic adventure to rescue the president from an apocalyptic alien threat. With out-of-this-world enemies, a never-before-seen arsenal of devastating weaponry and a host of genre-crossing mechanics, Bombshell is set to blow you away.

NVIDIA announced the first WHQL-signed driver for Windows 10. GeForce 352.84 WHQL offers full compliance to WDDM 2.0 specification, and offers support for DirectX 12 (feature level 12_0) on supported GPUs (all chips based on the "Kepler" and "Maxwell" architectures). There are no games that take advantage of DirectX 12 right now, but NVIDIA suggested a few tech-demos you can toy with, such as Forza DX12 renderer, Fable Legends DX12 Game Demo, Witch Chapter 0 DX12 SLI_support, King of Wushu DX12, and the Unreal Engine Race DX12 demo. DirectX 12 is highly anticipated among game developers, as it provides a leap in performance due to the way it handles multi-CPU. For the first time, 3D graphics rendering can take advantage of any number of CPU cores you throw at them, allowing game developers to increase eye-candy and detail. DirectX 12 will debut with Windows 10, which launches this July.DOWNLOAD: GeForce 352.84 WHQL for Windows 10 Desktop GPUs | Notebook GPUs