Epic's Unreal Next-Gen Samaritan Demo Needs Ten Xbox 360s

The Unreal Engine 4.0 could be designed to run on consoles ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360, if recent figures revealed by Epic Games are any indication.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney theorised at DICE last week that perfect photorealistic images would require 2,000 times the power of current hardware, but that technicians and artists could achieve good results with access to the power of 5,000  teraFLOPs (trillion floating point operations per second).

As displayed on Sweeney's presentation slides, Epic's next-gen Samaritan demo, which was shown at last year's GDC, required 2.5 teraFLOPs, which is noted as ten times the processing capability of the Xbox 360.



Unreal Engine 4.0 is set to be unveiled later in 2012 and is currently running on yet-to-be-revealed systems according to Epic.

Whether UE4 will recreate the visual polish of Samaritan remains to be seen, but these are the clearest hints yet at where next-gen is in development and how much of a visual leap gamers will be able to expect from the Next Xbox or PS4.

Nvidia claimed last year that its top-end graphics cards were around ten times more powerful than current-gen HD consoles.