Epic's Next-Gen

Something for the late-night readers to chew on. I'm not sure this has been said or not publically before but the next-gen rendering engine is a totally new set of code contrary to a lot of the earlier beliefs that it was just a juiced up version of the current Unreal tech. Check out the interview with Tim Sweeney of Epic at Gamasutra and some screenshots of the new tech just because:

...we've pretty much redone all of the rendering. We have an all-new polygon pipeline for rendering extremely high detail, high polygon environments. So, we've been focusing a lot on, and taking advantage of the new hardware TnL (Transform and Lighting) cards, and the NV20 [GeForce3], and all the new pixel shader and vertex shader effects that are possible. So, from a rendering point of view it's going to look all new and improved, but a lot of the tools are just incremental improvements [more screenshots]