Unreal Engine 4 Demo Could Be Displayed With Xbox 720 Announcement

New information has surfaced from a legitimate industry insider who says that the reason Epic had an NDA and closed off showings of the Unreal Engine 4 was because it's aimed to be on display at this year's E3 alongside the announcement of the Xbox 720 (or Trinity or whatever people want to call it).

The news comes courtesy of Now Gamer, who reports that EEDAR President and CEO Greg Short mentioned to them that...

"From a marketing standpoint it would stand to reason that any announcement around Unreal 4 or other major upgrades to engine middleware providers will occur very closely to the announcement of new hardware.""Since the majority of new features will be designed to maximise these devices they would not be able to promote that fact until the hardware itself had been unveiled." "Everyone will be looking to E3 this year to see what is announced (if anything!)."

That actually sounds about right and it would make perfect sense as to why Epic would prevent press and licensees from publicly talking or revealing details about the Unreal Engine 4. What's more is that VP of Epic, Mark Rein, has stated that the Unreal Engine 4 that they will be showing off will make the Samaritan demo look feeble, which is no small feat given that the demo was running in real-time on real hardware, requiring three over-clocked Nvidia 580GTX cards. Supposedly, this year, the same demo was optimized to run on just one Nvidia Kepler prototype card.

The news and rumors for next-generation home consoles has skyrocketed in the past six months and with Nintendo's Wii U launch looming for a fall release it does seem likely that Microsoft may announce something at this year's E3, given that Sony has adamantly stated that they will not be announcing anything at this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo.