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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 ..."
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:
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...
Read the article again - no-one is suggestig you upgrade, in fact almost the reverse. They talk about how all the early adopters of GeForce 2's were, in a sense, burned, because nothing has yet come out that needs that power, and so they could have waited until now (or even later) and picked them up cheap.
So, the point of the articel is to look at how a pre-pre-release game engine works on the different cards. They're saying, a year from now when games are using this kind of engine, what are todays cards going to be like?
Which is surely a Good Thing, since if you are buying a gaming card today you know it'll run everything out now damn fast, it just will it run Quake 6 or UT 5 or whatever. And, more usefully, if you don't want to pay big bucks for the latest and greatest how low down the tree can you safely go? For example, it's clear from this that the various GeForce 2MX variants are not a great buy for futureproofing, and that even the lowest spec GeForce 3 is a big advance.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
NVidia and ATI would very much like us to buy their video cards in order to be able to run next years games. If you read this review well you cannot come to another conclusion that anybody who bought a gforce 3 card last year has been wasting money since until next year there won't be any games taking advantage of it. By then, the hardware required to run these games will be much cheaper and the same money wasted on a geforce 3 last year will buy you much more performance when you will actually be able to use it.
My two year old pc has a voodoo 3 3000 which at the time was a relatively cheap card. It runs wolfenstein 3d just fine (ok barely but it's playable) so I consider it to be a good investment. If in a year or so Unreal II is released I'll upgrade my pc to be able to run it and invest some money in a good enough video card (I'll settle for full featured unreal 2@1024x768@35fps) and I'll be able to run any game to be released until 2004/2005.
Jilles
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)
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.
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...
Whether you own a geforce 2 or 3 is pretty much irrelevant for most games I know. My voodoo 3 is pretty crappy by todays standards but it still plays wolfenstein, quake 1,2,3, unreal (tournament) and many more games just fine. The driver issues are annoying but can be resolved with a little technical knowhow.
The nice thing about voodoo cards is that most game developers test against it (even though 3dfx no longer exists). My previous pc had an nvidia riva128 which was a fantastic card that was unfortunately poorly supported by most games (unreal 1 for instance ran much better on the inferior voodoo 1). These days I'd definately want a low end nvidia card since they are market leader.
A geforce 3 was overkill a year ago and it still is for most games today. Of course somebody who just wants the best doesn't care about the price of a video card and will buy a geforce ti 500 anyway. However I would recommend against buying one to be prepared for future games because when those games arrive the required hardware will be much cheaper and your ti 500 will be old news anyway.
Dropping a high end card in an old box is nuts since most games that actually require such a card also require high end cpus. Of course, if you insist on running quake 3@1600x1200@200fps you can't have enough hardware but most people would be more than happy running it at 1024x768 with around 40-50fps. Last years budget cards provide that kind of performance for most games on the market today.
I've never considered upgrading a PC a good alternative since invariably I end up replacing most components in the box to get what I want and buying a new box gives me much better performance at just a slightly higher price. The PC I currently have (PIII500, 512 MB and said voodoo 3 card) runs everything I need to run with an acceptable performance level. I have considered upgrading it a few times but its just not worth my money to get a few more fps.
Jilles
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