Check out how the beautiful Unreal Engine 4 tech-demo runs on a Nexus 5

Do you remember the Epic Citadel demo?Based on the Unreal Engine 3, it floored the tech community back in2010, when it was used to showcase the first-generation iPad'sgraphical prowess. At this year's Game Developer Conference, EpicGames demonstrated the new Unreal Engine 4 running on a Nexus 5smartphone (a stock unit without modifications, we assume). We knowthat Qualcomm's chip is quite capable, but we found it quitesurprising that last year's Snapdragon 800 CPU and Adreno 330 GPU areable to deliver such rich visuals. In the end, it seems that today's mobilegame developers aren't pushing Qualcomm's silicon nearly hard enoughto showcase its true potential.

It's not fair to accuse game makers,however. It's not that they are lazy, or that the technology isn'tthere - it's just that building games at such scale and detailrequires a huge investment that can hardly be recovered in a marketwhere $8 titles are considered somewhat expensive. In addition, suchgames can turn out massive in terms of data size - larger than whatmost users can comfortably download over a Wi-Fi or 4G connection.

Although most smartphone owners arecasual players who play simple games to pass the time, who knows -maybe mobile games that look as impressive as this tech-demo couldturn them onto complex (and expensive) games. But as everythingthat's great, this “maturing” of the market will take time.

Apart from looking better than ever,Unreal Engine 4 aims to ease developers with development tools thatlet them model levels and build games in real-time. For example,assets can be simply dragged and dropped in the level, while texturescan be selected and applied instantly to the targeted object.

via GFor Games