Slashdot Mirror


Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Revealed

Vigile writes "The Unreal Tournament 3 demo will be dropping sometime in the next two weeks. With a launch on the PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and even an in-box Linux client it will definitely be one of the most widely-played titles this holiday. With an early take on the UT3 demo's performance, PC Perspective has put up an article that compares cards from NVIDIA and AMD in both single and dual-GPU configurations to see which are the best performers. It turns out that even mid-range cards are going to be more than capable of playing UT3 at impressive image quality levels."

10 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. UT3 PC Demo is out NOW! by anti-human+1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    get downloading!
    Worthplaying
    Gamershell
    Computer Games.ro
    Fileplanet
    3D Gamers

    I just ripped the links off Voodoo Extreme. reply with more mirrors!

  2. Re:Linux but no Mac? by Ren.Tamek · · Score: 3, Informative

    Gears of War and UT3 are coming to the Mac, according to Epic's Mark Rein. Leaving it out of the news post is just an oversight.

    --
    "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
  3. What? by ahoehn · · Score: 4, Informative

    It turns out that even mid-range cards are going to be more than capable of playing UT3 at impressive image quality levels. Yeah, sure, midrange cards with a $1,000 CPU.

    Seriously. How about some benchmarks with a mid/low range CPU?

    I think I can safely assume that if bits of the demo dropped to 20FPS with a Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800, 4 Gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 8800GTS, there's really no point in even trying on a midrange machine.

    Why can't I find the button to digg this article down?
    --
    Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
    1. Re:What? by p0tat03 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Agreed. Seriously, an AMD 2900XT and a NVidia 8800GTX are not "mid range" cards. Even the 8800GTS is a upper-mid range card that's considerably above most "middies" like the 8600 series, or even the standard 8800 320MB series. It only reaffirms the assumption that UT3 is going to require a behemoth of a machine to look remotely good.

      And I will continue playing TF2 on my old box with a X1600, and it will run smooth as butter and still look great.

  4. Poor card coverage IMO by MrBandersnatch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Game performance reviews that just target the latest cards annoy me now. A quick look at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html shows that the latest ATI and NVidia card represent about 6-7% of users. While doing a wider range of cards obviously takes longer, looking at performance on the most popular cards of the last gen would sure be informative.

  5. Re:Linux but no Mac? by Solra+Bizna · · Score: 3, Insightful

    there are license and development tool complications for porting to the Mac.

    Ummmm... like what?

    On Linux, you have the option of GCC and SDL. On OSX, you have the option of... GCC and SDL. I'm not seeing the complications here.

    -:sigma.SB

    P.S. 2k4 for Mac used SDL.

    --
    WARN
    THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
  6. Re:UT3 vs. TF2 by Aeiri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    See, I can appreciate your sentiments, but I really hate to hear people use the phrase "dumbed-down" with respect to games (that said, it is certainly applicable in some cases). In my view, TF2 is a distillation of all that is good about team-based shooters, with very little of the annoying crap. Perhaps TF2 is "dumbed-down" in the same way that WoW is "dumbed-down" in many people's eyes, but in both instances I think these games have tried to simply get rid of a lot of the annoying crap seen in their respective genres.

    See, my view is that TFC is a distillation of all that is good about team-based shooters already, and that TF2 removed some elements which took some of the skill out of the game. It's still fun, but it's not quite as difficult.

    The big change is that they got rid of grenades. Each class had a standard grenade and a class specific grenade that did different things. This made going outside of your base more like entering a minefield and you had to hurry around know exactly where you wanted to go.

    Now for class specific analysis.

    Medic: First off, in TFC the class wasn't called a medic, it was a combat medic. The medic had two shotguns, the super needle gun (as they do now), and the health "weapon" was only short range, it didn't have magical homing abilities. Also the lack of concussion grenades is a real bummer. A trained medic could fly across the map with those things, but even so, it didn't seem unbalanced because of the way the maps were designed. You couldn't just fly to the flag and fly back, you still had to get into the base. Just a bunch of walking was taken out and your health took a big hit from the fall.

    Spy: This is where my real complaints come in. In TFC the spy couldn't cloak, the cloak replaced what was in TFC as the "feign death". So as a spy, you could pretend to die and you would lay on the ground, defenseless, appearing dead to the casual observer. You couldn't move around, and you had to do it convincingly otherwise people would just shoot your corpse and kill you. Another thing about the spy class is that the disguise time is about 3 seconds now. Before it was about 10-20 seconds, so you had to plan all of your attacks, and execute them without hitch because you couldn't just disappear and run away. No pistol either, just a tranquilizer dart that would slow your enemy down. No instant kill sentry weapon, only 2 grenades (one building destroy, essentially). Despite this, a good player as a spy would probably be on top of the server.

    Scout, Sniper, Demoman, Pyro, Soldier, Engineer: Practically identical, with very minor changes

    So really, the real changes were the Medic and the Spy. The rest were interface changes (such as the Engineer's build system or the Spy's cloaking system), but those were for the better.

    So they took the skill out of two classes that didn't cause any balancing issues in the first place. Watching a spy in TFC would be 100 times better than watching someone play Splinter Cell. Yet now, all I see is people cloaking in the wrong occasions revealing their location, stabbing someone or shooting someone, and cloaking and running away. Cloak and dagger tactics in the literal sense. That's not what the class used to be about. It took considerable effort to pretend to be one of the crowd, then sneak around and destroy a sentry. Stab someone, hide, feign, disguise again. Pretend to die in the right occasion, pop up when nobody is around, kill, etc.
  7. Re:Linux but no Mac? by SirTalon42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sounds like you didn't buy UT2004. They did a great job of packaging it, having a nice GUI installer, and quite stable (including supporting installing it for just the current user or system wide).

  8. OMFG!! by MrBandersnatch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whoever designed the front end UI needs SLAPPING. Hard. Very hard. And often.

  9. Re:UT3 vs. TF2 by Aeiri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No skilled player ever falls for feign death, and disguises in TFC are easy to spot (especially since they still bleed when disguised, while your teammates don't).

    Yes you do. You just don't know it.

    Most good spies will disguise as their own team and look like they are attacking with them, then have a bind that feigns + drops backpack. Completely convincing and nobody will ever notice the difference in a large firefight.