It seems that the mud-flinging has begun between Crytek and Epic Games as Crytek’s head honcho Cevat Yerli has said that the Unreal Engine 4 demonstration is doing things that the CryEngine has been doing for three years.

Speaking to GamesBeat Yerli said: ”The only thing I can say is that CryEngine 3 already exists at the quality of Unreal Engine 4.”

“It already exists for three years now. You can go back three years ago to the GDC videos. What we put out there is pretty much what Unreal Engine 4 put out now. And what many others are doing now too.”

Yerli even goes on to say that CryEngine hasn’t shown off what it’ll be able to do for next-gen – suggesting the CryEngine 3 footage shown is all current-gen.

“We haven’t really put out our latest stuff yet. Pretty soon you’re going to see the next iteration of CryEngine, and I’m not putting a number behind it, just the next iteration of CryEngine. Very soon. But we already said, CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago. We stand by that. If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it’s what we were seeing three years ago.

“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.”

These are definitely fighting words, as the Unreal Engine 4 will probably go on to power a whole host of new games in the next-generation, and interestingly what Epic showed off wasn’t the engine pushed to its limits, unlike what they showed with Unreal Engine 3 in the ‘Samaritan’ demo.