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Epic’s aesthetically resplendent Samaritan tech demo requires, in the words of Gears of War’s Augustus Cole, a whole lotta juice.
How much juice? Speaking at DICE Summit 2012, reported by Develop, Epic founder Tim Sweeney said the technical wizardry of the Samaritan tech demo, which was running in Unreal Engine 3, required 2.5 teraFLOPS to run.
The Xbox 360 can only produce .25 teraFlOPS, which means you’d need to solder ten Xbox 360 motherboards together to get enough virtual horsepower. That’s how it works, isn’t it? I’ll get the tape, you bring your console. Together we’ll have the next-gen up and running before Microsoft can even wave to activate a Kinect.
I know what you’re thinking, what actually is a teraFLOP? Uncle Wikipedia has you covered: in computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s, for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of a computer’s performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second. Since the final S stands for “second”, conservative speakers consider “FLOPS” as both the singular and plural of the term, although the singular “FLOP” is frequently encountered.
Unreal Engine 4 is expected to be released sometime in 2014, which means developers worldwide will spend the next few years scrambling to understand the whizzy new engine technology. But what, exactly, will it be able to do?
Last year Epic said the Samaritan demo was a “call to arms” to Microsoft and Sony. In that case, your move Microsoft and Sony!
