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Unreal Tournament 3

Performance and Visuals

The third revision of the Unreal Engine has become familiar as numerous multiplatform titles have used it during the past year. A common feature among these titles has been the requirement for Shader Model 3.0 hardware. Unreal Tournament 3 proves that this is an artificial requirement, probably stemming from development using Xbox 360 as the main platform. The game was actually developed for the PC as the primary target; console versions follow later, with the PS3 version before Christmas and Xbox 360 in early 2008.

While the title does run on some fairly old and obsolete hardware, it's possible only with some major visual compromises. UT3 offers just two important settings to change the visuals - Texture Resolution and World Detail. If you try to play on the minimum system, using an  NVIDIA GeForce 6200 or  ATI Radeon 9600, these have to be at the bare minimum, with the resolution set at 640 x 480 or 800 x 600, and even then the frame rate will hover around 30fps. The box asks for 512MB RAM and while this is technically true, it's also misleading as even with 1024MB the load times are painfully long.

The YouGamers minimum is set slightly higher than what the box says, with memory requirement set at a more practical 1024MB and the video card bumped up to an  ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or  NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT. This allows you to play at the common flat panel resolution of 1280 x 1024 with the frame rate hovering at 30fps even when things get hairy. Things will still look ugly, but it will play fine.

Minimum settings, playable on the YouGamers minimum system.	Medium settings (World and Texture Detail at 3), playable using the YouGamers recommended setup.
Bumping details to 4 adds full shadows, but the practical requirements climb up considerably.	Maximum visuals look sweet, but require the latest hardware to run smoothly in the thick of things.

The recommended specs on the box are... inconsistent. An  ATI Radeon X1300 and  NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX have very little in common - both support Shader Model 3.0, but that's it. You can try to bump up the detail with a X1300, but it will just turn the game into a slideshow - it'll run at minimum detail just like when using a Radeon 9800 Pro, but don't expect more from it. A 7800 GTX is a more realistic recommendation, and will run the game fine at World Detail and Texture Detail 3, but going beyond that requires more recent hardware. A dual core CPU is also fairly important - Unreal Engine uses all available cores and the game will be bottlenecked by your CPU with the recommended video card if you don't have a dual core CPU. YouGamers recommends more recent hardware, but as far as the performance goes, an  ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT and  NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT are both pretty close to what a 7800 GTX can do.

If you want to max out the visual quality without sacrificing frame rate, an  ATI Radeon HD 2900, the new Radeon HD 38x0 series, or an  NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series, is what you need (with 512MB or more video memory). Still, the game is perfectly enjoyable at medium graphical settings. All these recommendations assume you are playing at 1280 x 1024 and want to keep the frame rate at solid 30fps+ even when the proverbial human excrement hits the spinning air circulation device and the screen is filled with explosions and loose body parts.

There is gore and blood, but it's almost cartoony in appearance.

More bright explosions - as is customary with UE3 games, the bloom effect is heavily in use.

PhysX Support?

Unreal Tournament 3 uses Ageia's PhysX libraries for in-game physics, and supports the PhysX physics accelerator card. Some sources indicate that if you have one, it is used on all maps and game modes, but I couldn't really see any difference while playing the standard maps. If there is a difference, it doesn't show up on a modern dual core PC.

To really show off the card, Ageia commissioned a pair of special PhysX levels that you can download from their website (click here). While you can play these levels without the PhysX hardware, using just the software engine ensures that they are a complete slideshow. The reason for this is the massive amount of debris and destructible scenery included in these levels. Ageia has also included a new gun: a modified Shock Rifle that fires debris-sucking singularities to show off the physics capabilities of PhysX. One of the levels, "Tornado", lives up to its name by including a huge tornado that rips through the level, destroying buildings and spreading debris all over the place.

The main feature of the PhysX maps is the inclusion of a partially destructible environment.

The Ageia-produced levels also include a PhysX-specific weapon - a modified Shock Rifle that draws in all the loose debris.

So, finally a reason to own one of these cards? Sadly, not really. While the frame rate of these special levels is greatly improved by adding the PhysX hardware to the mix, even with the card these levels are painfully slow, with frame rate roughly half of what you get on any given normal level included with the game. Then there is the issue of level design: while the standard UT3 maps vary from good to great, and a lot of thought clearly went to ensure that they play well, the Ageia PhysX levels are little more than a fancy demo for the hardware. The level design is comparable to an average user-created mod, and while the effects are worth checking out if you already have a PhysX card, there's nothing here to entice one to spend money on the hardware.

Page 1: Introduction, Single PlayerPage 2: Changes to Modes & WeaponsPage 3: Warfare ModePage 4: Performance, Visuals, PhysX SupportPage 5: Final Thoughts and ScoresPage 6: Additional Images & Footage

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