Mark Rein says PCs can "simulate the future," have "shot by" consoles

VP of Epic, Mark Rein has been speaking to Eurogamer about the value of the PC as a cutting edge platform, saying that PCs are so far ahead that they are now setting the benchmark for the next console generation.

"Don't forget every game that's ultimately built is built on a PC. PCs are always going to be the tools through which all games get made," he said. "With the PC you can simulate the future – you can put enough hardware in a PC to show you what a future console will look like."

Epic did just that earlier this year when they unveiled the breathtaking Samaritan demo at GDC. It ran off a PC running on three top of the range Nvidia GTX 580 cards. The CG quality video was rendered in real time by an advanced version of the Unreal engine, a point that Epic demonstrated by fiddling with wireframe models and in-engine physics halfway through the demo.

"It was kind of our love letter to hardware manufacturers," Rein told Eurogamer. "The next-gen, we expect, will look like that. If you fast forward a year or two years that should be a fairly common gamer's spec.

"We hope the console manufactures look at that and go, jeez, if we aim for that in our next consoles we'll be competitive with what you'll be able to do on a PC in a year, year and half from now. A reasonably priced PC - obviously you can do it on an expensive PC already."