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Unreal Tournament 2K3 Gets Software Renderer

Posted by simoniker on from the laptops-worldwide-scream-in-delight dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out that the official Unreal Technology page has been updated with a software renderer for Unreal Tournament 2K3. This is an interesting step for those gamers with fast CPUs but inadequate 3D cards. The Pixomatic technology powering it was co-developed by Michael Abrash, John Carmack's right-hand man during the development of Quake, and a famous programmer and writer (at Microsoft and elsewhere) way before then.

4 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Huh? by TimeTrip · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe for people with pretty powerful laptops, but with a horrible graphics chip. Obviously they're not going to be able to get even basic 640x480 OpenGL quality.. but they at least be able to play it.... hopefully?

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  2. Re:Huh? by darkov · · Score: 3, Interesting

    UT2k3 is not a game for the 'casual' game.

    Well that's how I play it. You don't have too play it like you're a sad geek with no life but practising your UT. For some people (like me) who get lousy pings, there isn't much choice. It doesn't matter how quick you are with a 300ms delay before your shot is registered. You can play defensive or with a bit of strategy to make up for it. It's actually lots of fun frustrating dextrous kiddies who know where all the powerups are (and who cheat) with a bit of stategy. The BR patterns are best for this.

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  3. Good for benchmarks... by Joseph+Wharton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd really like to see an Athlon XP 3200+ go up against a Pentium 4 3.06GHz in software rendering. Usually, when a new proc comes out, everyone benchmarks it combined with a top-of-the-line video card. I've never seen the point of that. Why not use a software renderer to see how truly fast the CPU is?

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  4. Why not Mesa? by SeanAhern · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Considering that ID likes using OpenGL, I'm a bit surprised they aren't using Mesa, a free implementation of the OpenGL pipeline in software. Everyone who has XFree86 has it on their machine. It's reasonably fast, and gives you flexibility on platforms that either have no 3D accelerator, or have a much faster CPU.

    The only reasons I could think of that they'd want to write their own would be:
    • They wanted to optimize for the only the operations they use. Their renderer performs no lighting calculations, for instance.
    • They can optimize for a specific operating system and processor. They use MMX instructions, for instance.
    But that's about all I can come up with. And the compiler should optimize things for a given processor.

    Anyone have any other ideas why they decided not to go with Mesa?