Epic Games Calls iPad 2 Graphics ‘Phenomenal’ – ‘Unreal’ Stuff Ahead

9x faster graphics Is just what Epic Games needs to make great games for iPad 2, the studio’s Vice President, Mark Reign, suggested in an interview.

With nine times the graphical power of the first iPad, Apple’s second-generation tablet is "fantastic" for gaming, Rein said during a chat with the folks at VentureBeat.

He mentioned their Unreal Engine saying that it can now take full advantage of the new graphical capabilities.

"It's fantastic for gaming, we saw nine times more graphical power, Unreal Engine 3 can already take advantage of every bit of that. The device is going to have more memory than we had before so it means better texture detail, Dual core CPU - just the technical specs are phenomenal," he said.

Asked to further stress on their intentions with the new Apple tablet, Rein compared the hardware to full-fledged gaming PCs, saying "You can see how we run on a PC, you put a much more powerful graphics card and you can turn the dials up to have more detail, more textures, more shaders, things like that.”

"Clearly those are the kinds of opportunities. More CPU means potentially more physics, more enemies on the screen, a wider view of the environment," he added.

Apple has equipped the iPad 2 with a dual-core A5 chip, which is believed to also pack 512MB of RAM.

The Mac makers themselves stress that, “With up to nine times the graphics performance, gameplay on iPad is even smoother and more realistic.”

The iPad 2 is priced at $499 for the base 16GB WiFi model and can go up to $829 for the high-end 64GB WiFi+3G version.

Wireless and storage aside, all six iPad models set to become available on March 11 are identical from a technical point of view - all have the same processing power, battery life, screen etc.