Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, spoke (in an interview with IGN) of the changes gaming will have in the next generation and the challenge of bringing the Unreal Engine 4 to the upcoming generation of consoles.
"The big challenge that’s going to be coming up in the next decade is scaling up to tons of CPU cores. So the big challenge will be redesigning our engine and our workload so that we scale more of these different computer tasks between CPU cores seamlessly in real-time."
Sweeney also mentioned where gaming is heading.
"Number one is achieving movie quality graphics and movie quality pixels on the screen, which mean no flicker in the visuals, no popping artifacts, no bulky character outlines on the screen at all. We just haven’t been able to do it because we don’t have enough terra flops or petta flops of computer power to make it so.
The interview closed with Sweeney talking about motion controls and how they are affecting the market.
"I think for the foreseeable future the controllers are just an artificial impediment in between you and the game simulation. You’ll certainly see very interesting new types of games emerge around different controller ideas, but I don’t think it fundamentally changes the roadmap for gaming in the future."
Unreal Engine 3 is certainly past its prime, so it’s definitely good news that the Unreal Engine 4 is in full development. 2014 is the year that Sweeney predicted would be the beginning years of the next generation of consoles, and he looks dead set on being prepped for their arrivals.