Unreal Engine 4 could launch in 2014

In a new interview at IGN, Epic Games' main programmer Tim Sweeney admits, "I spend about 60 percent of my time every day doing research work that's aimed at our next generation engine and the next generation of consoles." However he added, "This is technology that won't see the light of day until probably around 2014, but focusing on that horizon enables me to do some really cool things that just aren't practical today, but soon will be."

Sweeney said that for Unreal Engine 4, the biggest issue will be to optimize the engine to work on many more CPU cores than what's currently available today. He states, "... the big challenge will be redesigning our engine and our workload so that we scale more of these different computer tasks between CPU cores seamlessly in real-time and dynamically so that you're always getting the maximum computing power out with the engine, regardless of what sort of work you're doing." He adds that for the next 10 years he is looking to see games that have true movie quality graphics which in his opinion means, " ... no flicker in the visuals, no popping artifacts, no bulky character outlines on the screen at all."