Epic Games's Mark Rein: mobile to be as powerful as home consoles ‘within a few short years’
That’s surely an Unreal-istic expectation
After revealing his excitement about the iPad’s gaming potential, head of Epic Games Mark Rein has said he believes mobile devices will match today’s home consoles ‘within a few short years’.
As opposed to a few ordinary length years, presumably.
Speaking to Develop, Rein called the mobile Nvidia Tegra 2 chip ‘amazingly powerful’ and a ‘good fit’ for the Unreal Engine 3.
Epic has already demonstrated a version of the UE3 engine running on the iPhone 3GS, which looked mightily impressive, even if FPS controls on a touchscreen do tend to split the gaming community somewhat.
Interestingly, one of the few major devices released with an Nvidia Tegra chip inside was the Microsoft Zune HD, of which a follow up has been ‘100% confirmed’ for announcement at next week’s MWC (which Pocket Gamer will be covering extensively.)
While the next generation of 1GHz smartphones will be more powerful than the present batch, they still have a long way to go to reach the same level of power the current home consoles contain.
So I wouldn’t be throwing your PS3 or Xbox 360 out just yet.
