E3 Reveal's Unreal Engine 4 and Luminous

Last week there were 2 tech demos revealed at E3. One by Square-Enix using the their new Luminous engine and one by Epic using the new Unreal Engine 4. If you haven't seen these beautiful demo's check them out here:

Agni's Philosophy by Square-Enix

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-agnis-philosophy/731722

Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo by Epic Games

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2012-unreal-engine/731875

Now here's the kicker. Both of these demos are not pre-rendered shots. In the video here below of Agni's Philosophy (cam) it starts off playing the whole video but after that they show you that this is all rendered in real time! Take a look as they pause they pause and move the camera around the scene. If you're wondering why it keeps going back into it's original position that's because the camera has keys that it follows and will be forced back into place. Aside from that we see them make changes in the character and effects and run the scene again and it looks just incredible. At the end they show you a nice side-by-side of their original pre-rendered test and the real time render.

Agni's Philosophy walkthrough:

The Unreal Engine 4 was mentioned and used earlier at GDC showing off NVIDIA's GeForce680GTX found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqNh-hxme8 In the video below Epic Game's Sr. Technical Artist Alan Willard shows off how everything thing is affected by lighting and how materials and particles react to it. He then continues to talk about what they've changed to the interface for developers.

Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo walkthrough:

MY THOUGHTS:

I think both these engines look absolutely stunning. I believe by unveiling these at E3 it really shows how far behind our current generation of consoles are. It's like Epic Games and Square-Enix are saying to Microsoft and Sony "HEY! Look what we can do now. Time to update your consoles so we can do something like this on it." I definitely hope Microsoft and Sony are paying close attention to these tech demos because it's developers that are having the constrict how they make games just so it can perform smoothly on the console versions. For Battlefield 3 instead of 64 player matches on PC it was cut down in half for it's console versions, not to mention shrinking down the maps and cutting pieces off. The Call Of Duty franchise wont do destructible environments because they don't want to sacrifice framerate like Battlefield has dropping it down to 30fps on consoles. Sure with a powerful PC you can run it at 60 but the developers get a large proportion of their sales on consoles. So that's what they cater to. Also if the Wii U can't run these tech demos and Microsoft and Sony do make powerful enough systems to run this then it will be like the Wii all over again being behind in the graphics race. I really do believe Nintendo should have waited on the Wii U but that's another story for another day.