Samaritan demo running in a Flash-based web browser."/>

Over the years, Adobe's Flash environment has earned a somewhat deserved reputation for primarily hosting simple, 2D games that can't really hold a candle to the fully realized 3D worlds of a game console or dedicated PC title. Epic Games gave reason to reconsider that stereotype at a Game Developers Conference presentation that showed off the power of its Unreal Engine 3 running completely in a browser-based Flash environment.

While Flash support for Epic's popular engine was first announced last October, the company is using this year's Game Developers Conference to make a big push for the idea of powerful, console-beating games running within a Flash 11 environment. Epic president Mark Rein started off by showing a demo of iOS graphics powerhouse Epic Citadel running inside Safari, with mouse swipes and clicks replacing the traditional swipes on the touch screen environment.

Rein then moved up to showing a Flash version of Dungeon Defenders, the million selling indie hit that is already available for practically every other platform. When run in full-screen mode, Rein said, the Flash version of the game provides the exact same experience as the Steam version, complete with gaming-friendly features like mouse lock.

But Rein's most impressive demonstration was a version of Unreal Tournament 3 that had been ported to run in the Flash environment, complete with graphical improvements like global illumination and improved texture detail over the years-old Xbox 360 version. While Rein was quick to clarify that Epic isn't actually planning on releasing the game for a browser environment, they put together the demo because they simply "wanted to show you can do this."

"You hear all this talk about HTML5 and all this stuff, but Flash is the technology that can today enable console quality experiences in your web browser," Rein said during the demonstration.

Of course, running a game inside of a web browser comes with a performance cost compared to running it as a native app. Rein admitted when questioned that this cost would definitely be noticeable on code that relies heavily on the CPU—an Unreal Tournament match with 60 enemy bots would stutter considerably in Flash, for instance. But for games that rely more heavily on the graphics processor, Rein said the difference between an Unreal Engine game running in Flash and running directly through the operating system would be negligible.

And Epic has even loftier goals for the use of Flash as a full-featured browser-based game platform. Rein said getting the company's state-of-the-art, DirectX 11-powered Samaritan demo to run inside a browser window is a "long term goal." That might seem lofty, but consider that the same demo, which required three NVIDIA GTX580 graphics cards (and a 1200-watt power supply) to run last year can now run on a single NVIDIA card. With the way the technology is progressing, getting that kind of performance from within an embeddable Flash player might not be so far off.