The next version of Unreal Engine won't be out before 2014 but it will be worth the wait, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney claimed.
"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," he said.
"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 then explained his belief that the biggest challenge and opportunity facing graphics engines in the near future is dealing with multiple CPUs.
"Once you have 20 cores, you can't easily say this one is going to be for animation and this one is going to be for details on the face of the character, because all these parameters change dynamically as different things come on screen and load as you shift from scene to scene," he explained.
"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."