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

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

[Masem]

I've got a very bad feeling that the gaming industry is heading towards a black hole of development. Sure, the GF3 and other graphics boards are truely amazing in terms of HW, with all the new pluggable rendering devices, hardware T&L, etc. And I'm certainly not going to complain about the graphics in a game that take advantage of such graphics.

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.

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

[NutscrapeSucks]

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.

There's also the real problem that game companies are outpacing the market penetration for top end hardware. While you can do wonderful things with a GeForce 4 or whatever, it's a real question if there will be enough GF4 users to profitably sell games to.

Gone are the days when you could slap Doom or Quake on pretty much any old computer in your office and have a network shootemup. Requiring recent 3D hardware eliminates the vast majority of PCs in the real world.

Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example). Half-Life is another game friendly to low-end boxes. Not to mention SimCity, RR Tycoon, Sims, and other big sellers that didn't require much hardware-wise.

Not to mention that the average user probably finds the whole world of 3D card to be a mess of confusing brandnames, limited retail outlets, driver woes, hardware upgrades, and so on. It starts to become real work for something that's supposed to be fun.

I guess I'm being presumptuous in telling game companies how to run their businesses. Just that from what I've heard, it sounds like the PC game sales are in the dumps, and only half the problem is unoriginal game concepts. Maybe they should consider quitting chasing the l33t gamer crowd or techies like myself that find it fun to keep up with the gear, and get back to the broader market of people who just want to blow off some steam after work.

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_

I work with the engine every day..

[Anonymous Coward]

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)