Geoff Keighley says Unreal Engine 4 wont run on Wii U

[zarx]

Navane said:

freebs2 said:
Well the samaritan demo did run on UE3, the WiiU will support Cryengine3 and Frostbite engine 2 so it will still run great graphics.

You make a great point. It's possible that we'll still see some great graphics outta the Wii-U with those engines in mind. We just might  not see the uber high-end UE4 graphics.

graphics aren't the only thing that UE4 improves tho, most of the improvements are on the tools side bringing it up to spec with CE3 for things like live editing and fully realtime lighting which makes game development easier and faster plus features like new intergrated physics and destruction tech which makes UE4 important. Especially for cross platform games. If the Wii U doesn't support UE4 it will mean a lot of multiplatform games won't make it to he Wii U as they would have to switch to a seperate engine for Wii U, something that most devs won't want to do. Most devs will want to use the engine with the vastly superior tools to make their games.

I would be very surprised if Epic did not support the Wii U with UE4 in some way personally even if that means a lot of features aren't available on Wii U, one of the big advantages of UE3 right now is the fact that it scales from phones right up to high end PC. Unless their plan is for UE4 to be phased in after 5 years (bad for business) they will want to get it running on as many platforms as possible.

The only reason for Epic not to support the Wii U would be if UE4 is built from the ground up for compute shader architecture which was added in DX11 spec GPUs (doesn't mean the system has to have DX API just the DX11 API required a certain GPU features so most GPUs since have used those features) unfortunately for the Wii U rumour has it it has a RV700 class GPU that lacks support for DX11 spec and it would be far to late to make such a drastic change to Wii U hardware so if the engine does require those more advanced GPU feeatures Epic may not have the choice of supporting the Wii U without basically building a whole new renderer.