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Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games

Posted by timothy on from the yesterday-is-right-out dept.

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 ..."

4 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bummer by Score0,+Overrated · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's this page with some screenshots of the engine in development.
    The latest is a few months old though, but there's pictures of landscapes and special effects.

  2. I work with the engine every day.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

  3. Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game by ymgve · · Score: 2, Informative

    My experience have been the exact opposite of this. While most Q3A-based games I've played seems fluid and ran well on my Celeron450/TNT1 setup, Unreal-based games seemed much more choppy. Also, UT itself had a tendencey to load things from the disk _after_ the game had started (and went on like that for atleast the first minute), resulting in even choppier framerate.
    But then again, the article states that the old Unreal engine is way more CPU than GPU intensive. How much horsepower did your i810 PC have?

  4. The Drivers Used in the Tests by Merconium · · Score: 2, Informative
    Did anyone else notice that the drivers used were the WHQL versions?

    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.