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Last week's GDC reveal of Unreal Engine 4 running on PlayStation 4 hardware gave us a revised look at 2012's Elemental PC demo - at the time operating on Core i7 in combination with Nvidia's powerful GTX 680 - and after the dust settled we were curious to see how the two renditions compared directly. This should give us some idea of the ways in which Epic has reshaped its code to better suit the new console platform. Of course, it's early days and UE4 in itself is still in development, but the question remains - to what extent can PS4 match up to a top-end PC?You'd think that answering that question would be as simple as running the footage side by side and playing spot the difference, but while there's plenty we can learn by doing that, it quickly becomes obvious that Epic hasn't just "ported" over its demo - it has extensively retooled certain elements, sometimes giving the impression of increased detail, sometimes falling short. On a technological level, it's clear that the more computationally expensive effects-work in the original PC version of the demo has been pared back - not surprising bearing in mind that the raw power of the GTX 680 is a significant leap beyond that offered by the new console generation.
Cutbacks aside, the overall impression from the PlayStation 4 showing is positive - in terms of detail, physics and effects, Elemental on PS4 is still a very cool piece of work, and we expect Unreal Engine 4 to pick up on the new wave of consoles exactly where UE3 left off on PS3 and Xbox 360 - as the preferred middleware of choice for next-gen AAA games development.
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