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Epic Unveils Samaritan
Last week Epic presented what the future of games could look like in a tech demo titled “Samaritan,” but only teased a handful of screens. Today you can watch Samaritan in action.
Designed to showcase advances in Unreal Engine 3 real-time technology, Samaritan utilizes DirectX 11 and NVIDIA APEX physics, amongst a roster of other impressive features. All of the additions can be found in the March Unreal Development Kit (UDK) beta, released for free to the public and available now.
Some of the higher touted refinements include adaptive Bokeh depth of field, dynamically shadowed image-based reflections, scalable bloom effects, and more. You can find a handful of additional inclusions from Epic below, or skip to watching the impressive demo at the bottom.
Important DirectX features now shipping with UDK include:
- Tessellation and displacement
- Geometry shaders
- Multisampled textures
- Shader Model 5
High-end rendering features include:
- Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing
- Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive
- Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before
- Deferred rendering with MSAA support
- Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh
- High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources
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