Watch the Unreal Engine 3 'Samaritan' tech demo

Epic Games has released a video version of its gorgeous new Unreal Engine 3 tech demo, named Samaritan, which it debuted at the Game Developers Conference last week.

The sumptuous demo, which was running in real-time at the conference, shows off new engine features and gives a look at what Epic says it "wants to see in the next generation of games."

Samaritan takes advantage of DirectX 11 features including tessellation and displacement, multisampled textures and Shader Model 5. It also uses subsurface scattering, Nvidia's Apex dynamics, Bokeh depth of field, image-based reflections, and other fancy technical wizzbangs and doohickeys.

Don't get too excited just yet, as the "next generation" part is key. While Epic did run the demo in real-time, it took a beastly PC with three GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards--the cheapest models of which cost around $500 apiece.

However, the features are now available to all developing with Unreal Engine 3, including in the latest version of the free Unreal Development Kit.