Nvidia and Epic demonstrate Unreal Engine 3

Los Angeles (CA) - Nvidia and Epic Games gave a first public demonstration of the Unreal Engine 3 today at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. According to the two firms, the game engine will raise the bar of visual quality in 3D games since it is the first game engine to take advantage of Shader Model 3.

The Unreal Engine 3 includes greater use of lighting and shadowing capabilities, advanced shader effects, and editing tools than similar technologies, according to Epic. The two previous Unreal game engines are widely used in game development today, as they provide game developers with a flexible and feature-rich foundation for the creation of bleeding-edge PC and console games.

To date, the Unreal engines have played a role in the development of more than 70 game titles, including Splinter Cell, America’s Army, Deus Ex : The Invisible War, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Shader Model 3 is a key feature of Microsoft’s DirectX 9.0, which offers several enhancements, if compared to the previous versions. For example, the technology now enables dynamic branching, shader anti-aliasing, back-face register and a more complex shader length, which allows greater lighting and procedural materials, according to Micrososft.

Nvidia’s Geforce 6 GPUs are currently the only graphic chips to support Shader Model 3.