Unreal Engine 3 now runs on the iPhone 3Gs

At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.

That the Unreal Engine 3 — an engine that powers many of the most graphically advanced games on the console market, like Gears of War 2, Borderland and Batman: Arkham Asylym — can run on the iPod Touch’s hardware isn’t really all that notable: the Unreal Engine 3 is built for scalability across a wide range of devices, and what we’re looking at here is the Unreal Engine with a lot of the more advanced effects turned down. That said, I’m amazed that we’re seeing an Unreal Engine 3 game running on the iPod Touch hardware before it has even come to the Mac: talk about prioritizing according to potential audience.

Epic’s move into app development shows a growing trend: major game companies like Epic are becoming very interested in bringing their games to the App Store. id software has had a great deal of financial success bringing ports of their Wolfenstein and Doom games to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and they haven’t even touched the Quake series yet.

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Unfortunately, there’s no word yet when the rest of us poor schmucks can play Unreal Tournament on our iPhones, though Rein says that more information about their iPhone port will be announced at CES.

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