Unreal Engine 3 Running on ASUS' Vivo Tab RT
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 29, 2012 11:23 AM ESTNVIDIA proudly announced today that Epic Games ported the UE3 powered Epic Citadel demo to Windows RT, and showed it running on ASUS' Vivo Tab RT. The Citadel demo first made its big splash on iOS, later paving the way for the Infinity Blade franchise on Apple's mobile platform. Epic has largely stayed away from publicly showing support for Android, although paying UE3 licensees are given access to an Android version of the Unreal Development Kit (the iOS UDK is available as a free download, by comparison). I suspect things will be different with Windows 8/RT however. Epic got its start on Windows, and this early show of support is likely a very good thing.
The demo ran smoothly on NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SoC, at 35 - 45 fps according to the video below. Getting UE3 up and running on Windows RT is a big step. Microsoft's trump card in ultra mobile race has always been its role in the game industry. If it can stop treating the Xbox like a console and make it more of a platform that can run on Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Xbox hardware, it will have a real advantage compared over Apple and Google. That's if Microsoft is willing to treat all of its platforms as equal class citizens when it comes to games it publishes.
Source: NVIDIA
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
20 Comments
View All Comments
StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
So. Windows tablets get a boring, ugly game engine that's almost a decade old. Woohoo!Baby steps I suppose, but can't wait to see what tablets might actually be able to do in a decades time.
Malphas - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Five and a half years isn't exactly "almost a decade old".Christobevii3 - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Isn't the call of duty series still a heavily modded quake III engine still?StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Unreal Engine 3 has been around allot longer than 5 and a half years.We saw glimpses and screenshots all the way back in 2004 and at that point it had been 18 months into development.
The first game to use it was Gears of War in 2006.
Irregardless it was merely an evolution of Unreal Engine 2, mostly in the shader, lighting and shadow department.
It's an old engine, it's past it's prime on the Console and the PC.
coolhardware - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
<i>irregardless</i> is not a word:-)
StevoLincolnite - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Yes it is. I made it one.Malphas - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Oh God, I knew someone would use this argument. You don't start counting how old an engine is by when you first become aware it's in development. You count it starting from when it's released. Gears of War was released at the very end of 2006, meaning that the Unreal 3 Engine is approximately five years and nine months old.If we use your bizarro logic to count date things then I guess the Unreal 4 engine is already nine years old since it's been in development from 2003, and was first revealed in 2005, despite the fact it hasn't even been released yet and there are no games using it. No-one is disputing UE3 being past it's prime, I was just pointing out that your statement about it being almost a decade old are exaggerated at best (I was putting it kindly, really) and outright nonsense at worst (which it is).
Spivonious - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
1. Porting from win32 to Windows RT is no small task.2. This is running very smoothly on mobile hardware. A Tegra 3 isn't able to run Crysis, so don't expect it.
If a developer can write someting once and have it run on the next Xbox, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8 with only minor tweaks, that is a huge advantage over Apple and Google.
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Yeah, I dunno, I think it's cool, too. :-)Penti - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The same game engine probably runs on OS X, iOS, Android, Windows/Win32, PS3 etc too. No small task porting them to a completely new and intentionally handicapped platform though. If it's a real Windows Runtime application that is. It's totally non-interesting to run games in the WinRT-runtime on Windows 8 and tie yourself to the Windows Store though.