In case you haven't already heard of it, there are several tech demos of
Epics new engine, which you can try out:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2369/unreal-engine-4-five-tech-demos/
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2368/unreal-engine-4-elemental-tech-demo/

The illumination and particle effects are quite impressive.

I've put up some galleries for each setting:
Realistic (small)
Elemental (small)
Cave (small)
Temple (small)
Shooter1 (small)
Shooter2 (small)

Or look here for a selection of it (beware: massive traffic):
http://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3134

Some useful console commands (Open up with tilde-key):

ghost - freefly, noclip
showhud - disables hud
toggledebugcamera - disable fixed camera in elemental and temple
fov - field of view
sg.PostProcessingQuality - use it to turn of chromatic aberration
sg.AntiAliasingQuality - use it to turn off (blurry) antialiasing

I allow myself to bump this once. Maybe there are people out there, who find this mildly interesting.

Sounds intriguing. I'll give the elemental demo a crack later to see how my HD7870 handles it.

Although I suspect that my aging Phenom X4 is likely to put the brakes on the whole affair...

Will definitely give this one a try, thanks :D

Well that was awesome!

Public announcement: The "http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2369/unreal-engine-4-five-tech-demos/ " actually has a game in it, called 'shooterDemo', and the elemental tech demo was damn impressive. The entire thing was damn impressive, just keep in mind that most of the 'static' demos don't have to do the calculations most PC games would have to do, so if they run smoothly, a game on that engine might not (applies to the shooter demo as well, even tho it was gorgeous, it wasn't exactly complex)

thanks for sharing :) gonna download to see how they look and if my pc can handle it :P

Interesting. Looks to me that UE4 is more GPU-intensive. Despite my mid-market GPU (HD 7870) and aging CPU (Phenom X4 with each core clocked at 2.8 GHz), I still get a respectable 30fps on average at 1920x1080. It's interesting that a lot of people forget this. Looking on Eurogamer and IGN, everyone was swearing blind that this was how next-gen games were going to look and that the PS3/360 era was already looking ancient.

It's not just a matter of background processing. There's also the development process to take into account - introducing interactivity while maintaining that kind of 'fluidity' and 'organicity' is a difficult thing to do. A game's appearance can often be negatively influenced by the use of repeating animations (walking, jumping, reused models). Also, fixed camera angles make for better optimisation because you can more easily predict (in fact, with running demos, you don't just predict - you KNOW) what needs to be rendered, lit. processed etc.

Holy crap, some of that looks good.
Especially the lighting in the small apartment.

Just trying to imagine something like a Crysis game running on that hehe
Whilst it does run smooth, it is only really small areas though, wonder how well it does in game sized zones.

Thanks! The realistic rendering demo is quite impressive.

Cool - I was interested in checking these out, but until now I think they were only available to UE4 subscribers.

I wonder if Techpowerup expected that many terabytes of downloads? :P

Downloading the elemental one now .

amazing, I like it all of them specially reflection demo, that one was the only one that look just ...like WOW!
the other ones while pretty they are very unrealistic, why do they shine so much?For example the temple it's like they they polish everything :/ it's unrealistic and a shiny thing doesnt mean it's good looking, same with the fps game, everything shines!
Reflecting on the other hand have shining surfaces but only when steam or water is there so it make sense, something weird was that when I got very close to something, the walls for example they blur out.

These are jaw droppingly good looking demos, despite my current rig can only barely run them about 15fps.

I try to not to get too exited about this type of stuff. It seems that generations of hardware and software come and go and we never really see anything like the demo's used to sell the tech.

Still, its very impressive. Even if devs don't tap all the advantages, at least visuals and potential will continue to advance.