The Unreal Engine 3 on iOS Is The Future of Mobile Gaming

John Brownlee ()

Ever since Epic Games first demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 running on the iPhone 3Gs last year, we’ve been wondering just what the creators of Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series had in store for us when they finally turned their attentions to the App Store.

Yesterday, at Apple’s annual September iPod Event, Epic gave us our first taste of what’s to come: Epic Citadel, a free and utterly gorgeous next-gen app that works as an interactive technology demo of Unreal Engine 3 running on iOS.

The 82.2MB tech demo doesn’t include any real gameplay, per se, but as a demonstration of what iOS is capable of — particularly on the A4 CPU — it utterly breathtaking, offering a fully-realized medieval town to explore. I imagine Epic won’t be able to crank so much detail out of their engine once the bullets and bodies start flying — and they will — but even so, this is astonishing. We are looking at Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 caliber graphics here… on a device that fits in the pocket.

We didn’t think anything could look better than id software’s recent demo of the Rage engine running on the iPhone 4, but Epic’s one-upped Carmack.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • ahmose

    Wow – that is a great demo and really does open up some amazing gaming potential. I still struggle with the controlling of first person games on the touch devices, but would be more than prepared to try again if the games looked this incredible.

  • king

    if it can output ps3 or 360 graphics

    how about porting some psx and dreamcast games?!

  • bzneophyte

    looks good enough for blizzard to jump in and start making world of warcraft!

  • http://www.sendmoneytomexico.org Amy

    Yes that much is very interesting indeed. The framerate is not that great though. We are seeing 20-25fps. Still impressive for such a device.

  • http://www.coloradogamecoders.com Mike C.

    I wonder how (if) it would run on my iPod Touch 2nd gen? I use Unity3D for 3D development and am very interested to learn how this will compare from a developer’s perspective. Very nice demo though!

  • BRANOBOSS

    will be more games like that on this engine?