Epic announced a host of new features in their Unreal Engine 3 development platform today at this year's GDC, the biggest of which is support for DirectX 11 and its assorted tools. The problem is, for most people, these kind of announcements might as well be in Sanskrit, they're full of tech jargon that goes right by the average gamer.
"Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing."- Reflections are hard to do in games without wrecking performance. You'll notice that many games you'll play go out of their way to break any mirrored surface so that there's a plausible reason for them to avoid rendering your character's reflection. The solution Epic discusses here sounds like it'll take a simplified version of the scene around a reflected object and apply all the different effects you'd expect on top of them.
"Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials (this makes character skin come alive)." - Materials like skin and other non-shiny surfaces aren't opaque, believe it or not. Your skin is colored the way it is in part because of the color of the blood running through the capillaries in it, and you can see some veins. This also means that when light hits it, it doesn't just bounce off. Some light penetrates it, which then eventually reflects back.
"Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials (this makes hair more look realistic than ever before)." - Anti-aliasing smooths edges. There are a variety of means of anti-aliasing, but the most effective methods can be really hard on video cards.
"Deferred rendering with MSAA support." - this means the scene you see is drawn in passes - the environment, the figures, the lighting, other effects, etc.
"Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh." - It pertains to how "pleasing" that blur is. There are different definitions of what "pleasing" means for depth of field (DOF) blur, but generally it means a clean look that isn't especially distracting. Unreal Engine games have had DOF effects for a while, but they've been pretty hit and miss.
"High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment (shadows for point lights and other light sources)." - A dynamic shadow means a shadow generated, er, dynamically. That means it reacts to light sources "on-the-fly.
This can mean a lot of things, but what it means to you is more detailed looking stuff with less system resources to do it. I grabbed some images from video card maker EVGA demonstrating some things that tessellation can do. Tessellation in particular is a possibly major addition to Unreal Engine 3. The Xbox 360's graphics processor actually supports tessellation, but to my knowledge it's never been used. This alone could lead to some major enhancements to the visuals in 360 games - assuming that the 360 version of the Unreal Engine 3 development kit supports it.
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