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 ..."

Comments

Re:Atari icon

[magicslax]

an ac writes:

I wonder... why the change? I doubt they had any problem with Nintendo. I think they just changed it because the N64 is now "officially obsolete".

heh. i think that atari stick might be "officially obsolete" as well.

on topic: interesting article; the benchmarks speak volumes. I knew the MX cards were slow, but they were absolutely punished by this engine. 1.9 fps! eek!

Bummer

[Matey-O]

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_

Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be too suprised if consoles shift to graphics over gameplay. The press, (not tech press, newspaper press) has been oozing praise over the graphics on the XBOX and such. For people buying such a machine for the first time, they would look for the most reconizible feature, graphics, THEN, after they have the system for a while, gameplay. Thats why a lot of the first games to come out for the N64 sucked, but looked good. It wears off after a while.

Kyro II

[13Echo]

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...

Re:All new and NOT improved

[mlong]

I refuse to use a nvidia because of thier unstable drivers

Hmm so you would use ATI who drops their drivers a few months after released? I mean seriously, they release drivers then as soon as they release their next greatest video card, they drop development on the other card drivers. I used to have an ATI Rage 128. It was so buggy I couldn't use in three or four games. ATI never did release new drivers or fix the problems. I finally ditched it and got a Nvidia which worked fine (and it still working in one of my older computers).

D3D vs OpenGL

[BadBlood]

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.

Ultimate 3D quality... plus Blast from the Past 3D

[dpilot]

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.

I wonder how JC & Id are approaching this...

[wrinkledshirt]

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?

Wow. A lot of misconceptions floating around...

[TheGreatGraySkwid]

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:

The Unreal Performance Test 2002 (UPT) has nothing to do with any of the games using our engine and should not be used to draw conclusions about game performance. I'll contact Anand and make sure he knows to highlight this. The benchmark is designed specifically to push the latest and greatest graphics cards as hard as we can. UPT is about the future, not the present. All of this will become clearer over the next few months. We will also be adding more features and content to UPT2002 to push things even harder. "Influence, Educate and Improve" will be our motto for the Unreal Performance Test. A lot of cool things are planned. In popular game development lingo what you're seeing now are some preliminary results from what equates to an early alpha version. Stay tuned! Afterthought: I guess I shouldn't say "as hard as we can" because I'm sure we could push things even harder if we weren't so busy making our game. The Unreal Engine is no longer CPU bound so if you want to make a game that pushes the absolute upper limits of xxx [i.e. insert the name of some imaginary future card that has massively higher fillrate and poly throughput and might be announced the week after next] you certainly could but then, of course, nothing earlier than that could run it. This test is very much about making something to test today's high end cards and the cards of the future. Putting the lower-end cards in the test wasn't really fair because the content wasn't designed to support those levels of performance. Certainly the games using the engine this year wouldn't want to be so aggressive with the content and detail settings. To borrow a phrase from Spinal Tap, the UPT detail settings are set at "11". Unreal2 and Unreal Tournament 2, for example, certainly won't be set at "11" because we want EVERYONE to be able to enjoy them. I suppose Unreal Championship could be dialed up to "11" because it's on Xbox, maybe even "11.5". One more thing (this will be corrected in the article shortly): Dan Vogel said the flyby had "as many as 100,000 triangles." - to clarify that it should say as many as "100,000 triangles in view." There are certainly a LOT more than 100,000 triangles in the demo.

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.