Speaking with Venturebeat, Crytek founder, Cevat Yerli, lashed out at the recently unveiled Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games, claiming that "CryEngine 3 already exists at the quality of Unreal Engine 4", and dug his heels in by adding that CryEngine 3 had been around "for three years now" in this apparent state of quality.

"You can go back three years ago to the GDC videos," he asserted with his claim. "What we put out there is pretty much what Unreal Engine 4 put out now. And what many others are doing now too. We haven't really put out our latest stuff yet.

"We [have] already said CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago," he said.

There's no denying CryEngine 3's feature-set or visual fidelity, but these are big claims. Whether or not he's talking more about the latter, or soapboxing about the former is hard to discern, but he definitely stands by the Crytek tech.

"If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it's what we were seeing three years ago," he continued. "We already had massive particle systems, we already had GPU rendering, all these things. Deferred shading. We had tessellation already since we shipped Crysis 2. We already had DX11. We didn't just talk it up as tech demos, we have games that are shipped and are doing it."

In case you missed it, Epic released an epic video showing off their next-gen engine, and it certainly doesn't fail to deliver in the wow-department. Check it out embedded below, or right here for a direct link. You can also watch a 10-minute video detailing the new engine's feature-set right here.