Rein: 3DS Seemingly Not Powerful Enough For Unreal Engine 3

Epic Games VP Mark Rein said that the company currently has no plans to develop games or a version of its Unreal Engine 3 for Nintendo's upcoming 3DS portable. Speaking to Joystiq, Rein said the system's specifications appeared to be below the minimum necessary to run the company's signature 3D graphics engine. "We don't have a 3DS, so there's no way for us to verify that, but everything we've been led to believe is that it's below our min-spec," he said. Rein specifically cited the Unreal-Engine-3-powered Epic Citadel demo the company recently released for some versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch as the sort of benchmark that would be unreachable on Nintendo's portable. "Like I said, we really don't know enough about it to make a formal comment, but I think if they considered that our engine would be good on it, they would have probably talked to us about it," Rein said. Reports point to a 3DS hardware specification with 4 MB of dedicated video RAM and a PICA-200 graphics chip that can generate an estimated 10 million polygons per second.