A Truly Epic Tech Demo

Alongside a bunch of iPod, iTunes and AppleTV updates, Apple also showed off its new Game Center app, bundled with the new iOS 4.1 at their music event yesterday. To demo the ease-of-use of finding friends online, they allowed Epic Games to give a tech demo of an upcoming multi-player game. However, I think it's safe to say that like me, most people forgot about Game Center completely and simply marveled at the console-quality graphics of Epic's Citadel tech demo. It uses the Unreal engine, and the graphics were so stunning that even my wife asked in shock "Is that on an iPhone?" What you see on the left there, is an actual in-game screenshot.

"Well", you think to yourself, "they're probably cheating somehow." But then, shortly after the keynote, Epic actually releases the tech demo into the App Store. I downloaded it and, wow, am I impressed. I would say the graphics are on par with my favorite MMORPG "Myst: Uru online" - and that really maxes out my iMac's graphics capabilities. The tech demo includes live shadows and complex shaders, such as parallax mapping (which for those who don't know, is like bump mapping, but actually changes the geometry of the surface, rather than just the way light falls onto it). And the frame rate is excellent, even when looking over endless landscapes, or at the whole castle and village from the outside. Though I was not able to test this particular feature (owning only an iPhone 3GS and an iPod 3rd gen), I hear it looks even more gorgeous on the Retina display.

More screenshots after the break.