This what the future of mobile gaming looks like

Having shown us what smartdevices are capable with the likes of Infinity Blade and Epic Citadel, Epic Games is ready to push mobile tech even further with Unreal Engine 4.

Epic had repeatedly set and then raised the bar for graphics technologies on PC and consoles, and it's not ready to rest on its laurels. The company seems determined to spread its wings over mobile as well, building on its success of Unreal Engine 3 on iOS with a new Unreal Engine 4 demo.

Like Epic Citadel, Zen Garden isn't a game, but an explorable environment showing off what developers might be able to do with the tech on the latest iDevices. Don't be too disappointed, though; Infinity Blade followed pretty closely on the heels of Epic Citadel, and Chair Entertainment must be up to something down there in Salt Lake City.

The app is due to launch in the wake of iOS 8, but even just going by the one image we've got our hands on it looks pretty shiny. Gamespot reports it's all thanks to Apple's new Metal API, which was announced at its Worldwide Developers conference overnight and will come out of beta soon.

Metal will "dramatically improve the CPU efficiency of rendering on iOS devices", apparently. Polygon reports it provides deeper access to iOS device hardware, reducing OpenGL overhead, and will offer efficient multithreading and shader technology.

Besides Epic, which sent founder Tim Sweeney to show off its demo, Crytek, Unity, EA and Epic Games have pledged support for the API.