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Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games
GweeDo writes: "Anandtech has gotten their hands on a recent build of the Unreal Engine to give today's hardware (Geforce 3 ti's and upper-class Radeons) a run for the money to see how they will do on tomorrows games. The article is here and quite a good read ..."
It may have already been said, but does anyone get the impression Slashdot has been posting so many game stories so it can show off the new Atari icon?
I have a problem playing TODAYS games, yet alone playing some overblown overhyped new engine that puahes more polys. I refuse to use a nvidia because of thier unstable drivers, so that leaves me out of the 100 fps crowd. Who cares.
Josh Crawley
Doooh!
Im not going to upgrade my machine for the "latest and greatest" when the original unreal tournament is just fine.
Im quite sure my current machine could "handle it", the other two machines on my network would have to be upgraded considerably in order to play it with other people in my house (upgrade = throw in trash and buy/build a new one)... no game is worth $2000.00 (plus the cost of the game)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Wouldn't it be easier to create a subsection for gaming news like the oné you have for security and programming etc...?
Then whining about the number of gaming articles could be minimized because they can deselect the topic in their customisation.
It's great to see that the gaming industry is doing it's best to influence the graph card manufacturers.. up untill now it was the otherway around so developers were having to release games that were not fully endorsed.
Nothing more depressing if things were not as you want them to be.. now it's easier to do... however... it also means the unreal engine will be the dominant factor in the industry ruling out almost all other engine's...
However, you can put all the greatest graphics in the world, but if you don't add something interesting in terms of the game itself (plot, gameplay (both single and multiplayer), etc), then all you've got is a pretty looking game that no one is going to buy. And too many of today's games are just that; there hasn't been anything 'different' in the FPS arena since Half-Life, Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever, Diablo 2 in terms of RPGs, and so forth. There's only two interesting areas of games that I've seem them take great steps above their predecesors as to make them different; first is the X4/real-time strategy games such as Black & White and the recent Dune title, which are now combining good 3d engines with good gameplay (though Myth would be the first real entry in this catagory). The other is the simulation area: recent entries of games like Startopia combine the graphics and a rather detailed but playable ruleset to make a good game.
So while the hardware makers keep pushing out better cards capable of running all the graphics effects today, the game makers seem to be too tied up in taking advantage of that and not of improving the underlying game itself. I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Am I the only one that thinks it's a bad idea to judge how a game will perform on certain hardware before the code has been optimized for a full blown release, or are these games already more or less "complete" and waiting to be released for marketing reasons?
Show of hands here, who actually wanted to SEE pics of the new engine in action?
What's the point of saying 'Gee these are really nifty in this demo' if we've got no visual point of reference?
A major part of a GPU benchmark is how well the display _appears_
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
The even more interesting thing is just how well the Kyro II line of card (Herc 3D Prophet 4500) is standing up to the GeForce 2 line of cards. That's not bad if I say so myself. At 1024x768x32, the card that nVidia dubbed "TNT 2 class" is keeping up with the GF2 pack, and is right behind the high-end GeForce 2.
Personally,I think that the Kyro 2 is the best deal in video accelerators right now. It's got plenty of juice for current games, produces a beautiful image, and can be puchased for a price as low as $60-$70. There really is no reason to buy a GF2MX considering the performance gain that you get with a Kyro 2. And, when the chips finally get a hardware T&L unit, they will be smokin.
Now, if only they would release those Linux drivers...
Isn't the reason to buy an 8500 or a GF3 so that you can play tomorrow's games? There are very very few that actually challenge today's hardware in a cutting edge PC. I guess I just saw the results I expected to see when I bought my 8500 a while ago. Nice to know I'm not totaly screwed.
Anyone have a url to screenshots that depict the new engine's capabilities?
Thanks!
At the lower res the 8500 was faster, but what percentage of the gamers play below 1024 x 768? I haven't set the resolution game to below 1024 x 768 for over 2.5 years. The results were interesting, though it would have been nice if Anand posted 1 or 2 screen shots, especially one of the bug mentioned.
I work at one of the many companies that license Epics Unreal technology and I can tell you something of what is happening with the engine compared to the older titles like Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
:-)
There are a LOT of rendering improvements. The new renderer depends heavily on the GPU to offload the triangle rendering from the CPU. There are new primitives dubbed in the engine that are there to explicitly call for GPU support and render very, very fast.
This is why most games based on the new engine is going to have a lot more polygon detail and can use these rendering primitives to step up from blocky, repetitive levels to much more realistic environments with more depth.
Terrain is done in a similar manner, and the editor tools allows you to paint and modify the terrain in realtime preview. Multiple layers are allowed and you can control the blending in many ways.
A lot of other small improvements are in as well, such as texture compression, native skeletal animation, advanced particle systems, render anti-portals (for manual occlusion specification).
And the thing runs in very acceptable FPS
(sorry about being an AC but I don't want to be pinned to the wall and shot for saying anything I shouldn't have)
Its 2d only for me on the pc. I have a psx1 and a GBA and that`ll do nicely. I simply cannot be arsed having to get a new version of directx or drivers for my 3d card, or spend twice the price of a PSX2 (or GBA and about 6 full price games) just for a 3d card which will be shite in about 9 months time. Who can be bothered. Its not like the games are worth it anyway. GBA is great for fun, 2d games that dont have anything to prove. PSX1 is great for squillions of cheap, fun games. PSX2 will be sensibly priced later this year. Who needs the stress of a PC involved in gaming - its bad enough trying to use them to get work done.
with those that bemoan the dearth of *new* games that actually have a compelling plot and/or gameplay that take advantage of this kick-ass hardware. The last game that I thought was really compelling (that was new) was 7th Guest. That came out years ago. I think it was around that time that Civ II came out as well. Now we're surrounded by FPS and that seems to be about it.
> (Geforce 3 ti's and upper class Radeon's)
The apostrophe is never for pluralizing words. What is wrong with "Geforce 3 TIs and upper class Radeons"?
Ok, this is going to be moderated as a troll / flaimbait, but I don't need such graphical quality in a game. What I expect from a game is good gameplay, an immersive storyline, emotional inducement, etc. Unfortunately, there is no progress at all in these fields.
I also didn't see any mention of which graphics API was used. My hunch is that it's Direct 3D.
What follows is simply my opinion: I prefer the looks of OpenGL rendering on Nvidia hardware. My order of preference from a visual perspective was OpenGL, Glide, then D3D. I know Daniel Vogel (once a Loki guy - PS: Good career move) was responsible for most of the OpenGL work on UnrealTournament (i.e. using the S3TC-based textures on the 2nd CD), so my hopes are that this new engine will have OpenGL rendering.
I definitely take a performance hit going from D3D to OpenGL, but with pageflipping enabled in the drivers it's not too bad. I also am willing to do this for my perceived visual enhancements.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I look at the idea of playing Capture the Flag on Quake-family games, and see the quest for ever-more-real 3D, and wonder why people just don't go for the Ultimate. Pick a decent night, go outside, and play Capture the Flag. Real Reality, the Ultimate in Virtual Reality. I remember real Capture the Flag from Boy Scout campouts, and the nights weren't always that decent, but that was part of the fun.
The 3D gaming is getting just a bit bizarre, but I'm still reasonably happy with Quake3 on my Matrox G400 - bought on the strength of 2D image quality as well as Open Source 3D support. Unfortunately the latest'n'greatest drivers seem to be headed back to closed source.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Just LOOK at the specs required to run the latest engine in top notch mode and get decent framerates - painful!!
However the orginal Unreal was one of the reasons I shelled out for a PII 233 and a 12MB voodoo way back then. It was gorgeous and wonderful havnt a system capable of allowing me to lead the pack in deathmatches.
Guess its time to sell the children again *sigh*
Point is that this is a engine/game that I WILL upgrade for ( I bet DNF ends up being delayed while they port to it ) and Im sure lots of other peeps will.....I guess games still are driving hardware sales :)
Speaking of Capture the Flag, you can't beat that old PC version (not the quake mod) from around 1991. You could run and explore and capture the opponent.
;)
The only bad part was having to leave the room for your opponent to make his turn. But that's what the Super Nintendo was for
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Today's Top Deals
They should have renamed the executable to quack3.exe before benchmarking :)
Kidding aside, it's cool to see Radeon 8500 definitively beat out the more expensive competitor in a next gen game, but of course, as anandtech points out, there was a bug with fog in the ATI driver which may have helped performance as a side effect. Now the question is how long until the linux drivers support some sort of hardware accelerated 3D on 8500 chips.
Also, in XFree 4.2.0, are XVideo overlays working for Radeon 8500? All I see is 2D is supported, but 3D is not, and 2D "supported" could mean a lot of things. Also, does the GATOS stuff work with the 8500DV?
I've been considering purchasing an All-in-Wonder 8500DV, but if good support is not coming soon, I might hold off...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is there any point? With Geforce 4 MXs around the corner at a very affordable price(it looks like they'll debut at around 100-120 dollars), does it really matter if todays uber-cards get whipped?
Granted, some people spent big bucks for their Geforce 3 Tis, but they will still be able to play games, just not at the bleeding edge anymore. That's a main point of the video card industry -- it's fast, so don't feel bad when your card is not high end enough to run at max detail anymore.
It's been a long time.
No offence to the guys coding Unreal, but I've always believed Id to be at the forefront of games that take advantage of hardware. I'd really like to know what they think about all this, and since he's been so up front with us before...
Carmack, are you listening? How long before we start seeing engines that are going to take advantage of all these whizzbang features in the GF3? Are you still thinking (like what you wrote that got posted on linuxgames) that the GF3 is still the best card of the lot? Tested any Doom builds on the latest ATIs or GFs, and got any insight for us?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
With the 23.11s being a major culprit in the infinate loop error problem and the 8500's 3286s being replaced with a newer version that is WHQL certified (6014) which is availible publicly from windowsupdate.com, how relevant are the results, especially for the 8500?
I know that my score in the Nature test went from an average of 30 FPS to 45 when I went to the 60xx series of drivers.
Moreover, people are showing huge OpenGL speed differences in the leaked 6018s that are floating around at http://www.rage3d.com
In the end, is this a real test of where these cards will be when the game actually comes out?
I don't think it is.
Is there a good resource for finding info on what 3D cards are supported on XFree86? From what I've seen, it looks like the Radeon 8500 isn't supported in 3D mode on 4.2.0. Is this because ATI won't release the specs, or because the XFree guys just haven't had the time?
Obviously anything from nvidia doesn't matter because they have closed drivers; I'm only wondering about *proper* support in XFree.
The article is at AnandTech the headline says TomsHardware...OOPS!
What kind of bullshit is this? The "new" unreal engine doesnt use any of the new GPU features like vertex shaders or pixel shaders or ATI's smartshader???
So basically the engine is designed for the lowest common denominator Kyro card? Ugh.
When will gamers get a new engine designed for all the new Nvidia/ATI feature sets? Or are these features just marketing gimmicks that wont work in the real world? Somebody get the Carmack to answer this stuff.....
Their charts only showed the average frames per second, which is nice to know. But if I am looking at a card, I don't want to see wildly diverging frame rates... I think they should have an extra factor on their charts showing the slowest frame rate noted during the fly by.
34 fps might be alright if you never dip below 30. But I seriously doubt that to be the case.
Maybe they should even give a percentage of time during the fly by spent at less than 30 fps.
...and find an employer which gives you a kickass gaming machine to work on.
(Dual P4 Xeon/1GB/Geforce3 here :)
must they leave out the new unreal screenshots!
John Romero felt the same way about technology -- it had reached an "acceptable" level and design was really the only thing that was important. Well, that was back when he decided to licence the Quake 1 engine for Daikatana. Midway through, the designers realized that they had run into a wall because the engine would not allow them to do all of the things they had put into design documents. So, they quickly (well, not so quickly I quess) switched over to the Quake II engine.
People in the interesting have long been claiming that it is time for technology to lose it's relevance, much in the same way that the technology in the movie industry took a back seat to the artistry and content that went into motion pictures.
Why do people constantly make the mistake in assuming that all of the games made 20 years ago were good, and that the current generation lays exclusive claim to having crappy, derivitive games? The fact of the matter is that the percentage of good games to bad games hasn't changed all that much. Sure you remember how the gameplay of PacMan trancended its graphics, but do you remember the gameplay of, say, "Bop n' Wrestle"? If you're lucky the answer is no, because it sucked ass! Bad games are forgotten quickly.
Will technology in games become irrelevant? Probably. Just as good 2D performance is presumed, I'm sure that the same will be true for polygon-based performance someday. Have we reached that point yet? The answer is simply no.
Technology in the movie industry lost its relevance around the time directors realized that their imagination was becoming the limiting factor in what they could accomplish. I feel that we have a ways to go before this happens with video games.
Personally I hope we don't stop pushing technology until we get a game with Final Fantasy's gameplay, and... Final Fantasy (the movie) graphics! That would be sweet.
The code and the hardware are distant cousins. They don't talk to each other. They coexist. And they rarely see each other except at Christmas. Like testing WinXP binaries on a Commodore running an emulator. Try testing "future" software on "future" hardware. Too much BS here to suit me. (Carmack doesn't have a clue about such stuff.....all bow down and weep.)
all I had to play with was a brick and a rusty bucket. What is it with these kids today and their fancy 'puters! I had plenty o' fun, and I didn't need no fancy-shmantzy GEE-FORCE THREE!
If a brick and a rusty bucket was good enough for me, it's good enough for them, dag nab it.
Firstly, a correction of the initial post, this is not just "a recent build of the Unreal Engine," it's a build specifically designed and packaged to stress rendering hardware to their limits. The 2 games nearing release using the Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament 2 and Unreal 2)will be using a dramatically different codeset than this "UPT 2002" does, and those games will be better optimized for more efficient utilization of system resources than this thing is, while still using a number of cutting edge features that this thing doesn't (like custom particle engines, vertex/pixel shaders, and nifty stuff like that).
Quoting Mark Rein, who works for Epic:
This is all being discussed extensively in Infogrames' Unreal 2 forum.
Oh, and one more thing: Unreal 2 will be D3D only, and I wouldn't be surprised if UT2 is the same (although I don't follow it as closely). You may commence your moaning and bitching.
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
One example: id gave us "Doom", Irrational gave us "System Shock"
System Shock was developed by Looking Glass Technologies (later Studios) and published by Origin. Irrational was founded by ex-LGS employees in 1997 and codeveloped System Shock 2.
Doom blew everyone away with its revolutionary 3D engine, but the game was pointless. Fun, but pointless, and got old fast. Same with the bazillion Doom-clones that came out soon after (including everything id has done since), but then came "System Shock", which I hadn't even heard of until after the fact, which took the Doom-style 3D engine and put a real plot with lots of interesting backstory, role-playing elements, and world that didn't consist of endless brown labyrinths.
System Shock was built on the Ultima Underworld engine, which was in many ways more advanced than Doom and predates even Wolfenstein 3d. However, while neither the engine nor the gameplay were very innovative, Doom and its sequels should not be trivialised. Give credit where credit is due.
Did "System Shock" do incredibly well? I doubt it sold anywhere near what id's software sells (even on a bad day), but I will always remember it as one of my favorite games ever (same with "SS2").
System Shock actually fared well for a computer game at the time, though obviously Doom commanded more attention.
Yeah, but in Boy Scouts, they didn't let you use Sniper Rifles or Rocket Launchers as part of the game.
ShoutingMan.com
Not to mention the ability to beat the crap out of cops. :-)
(I'm gonna get modded into the basement for this one)
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
To be fair, in Boy Scouts I didn't get to go bouncing around platforms floating in space or in castles, either. Though there were a few barns, which can be almost as neat as the castles.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
My SNES was across the house from the computer... the Genesis was right next to the computer. Take a turn, play some Powerball! :)
I'd do more of that, too, but the hardware is just so expensive! I mean, you just can't compete without an automag, and then a nitro kit and boy, you go through a full case of paint a day that way! It's so much cheaper to just play Q3...
What do you mean you can play capture-the-flag in meatspace without paintball markers?
-JDF (who plays with a stock Tippman '98.)
Yet, with the option of AmigaDE which will support OpenGL 1.3 (Mesa 4.0) which is a cross platform high-level 3D API (Mac, Linux, Windows, AmigaDE etc), the future for you may, not at all, be limited.
Matrox G450/G550/ (850?) will be supported by AmigaOS4.0, along with the ATI Radeon, and this will likely be carried onwards to the AmigaDE which will run as an Application Layer on Windows and Linux.
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
"I drive a pickup truck rather than a car because I don't like how sports cars made later will be faster".
No, because if a car is compatible with the road now, it will always be. Your analogy would have to include the road surface changing a little each day, so that at the end of a year or 2, you`ll find less places you can drive, unless you buy a new car which can handle the new road surface.