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Games Entertainment

Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games 157

Posted by timothy from the yesterday-is-right-out dept.
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 ..."
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Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games More

Today's Hardware on Tomorrow's Games

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  • It may have already been said, but does anyone get the impression Slashdot has been posting so many game stories so it can show off the new Atari icon?

  • Like Microsoft... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by night_flyer ( 453866 )
    Im not going to upgrade my machine for the "latest and greatest" when the original unreal tournament is just fine.

    Im quite sure my current machine could "handle it", the other two machines on my network would have to be upgraded considerably in order to play it with other people in my house (upgrade = throw in trash and buy/build a new one)... no game is worth $2000.00 (plus the cost of the game)

    • Re:Like Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by biglig2 ( 89374 )
      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.

    • Re:Like Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jilles ( 20976 )
      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.
      • 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.

        I disagree...I use games that are DX8 showboats all the time -- aquanox, for example.
        (from the article) ...We can also derive from this that early adopters of the GeForce3, although they spent quite a bit, are still among the top three performers in this benchmark."

        That said, with graphics technology increasing at the rate of Moore's law squared, you shouldn't, theoretically, be able to have year old technology that still performs in the tip-top echelon. But according to this test, that is precisely the case.

        Just because you're pissed at having to use cobbled together drivers from some 3rd party effort because your favorite graphics card maker went out of business doesn't mean you should baselessly degrade current technology.

        Also, you should consider that dropping a high-end GPU in an older box will go extremely far towards increasing your performance, vs. building an entirely new box.


        • Re:Like Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jilles ( 20976 )
          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.
          • 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.

            Firstly, this is an absolute farce. Games that have been produced in the last year (i.e., anything using DX7-8) include code to offload most of the poly & triangle rendering to the GPU. That's why you can run Unreal Tourney @ 1280*1024 @ 35-40fps on a P-233 with a geforce3.

            Secondly, in response to "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...

            Upgrading my athlon thunderbird to an athlon XP requires only a processor change (very inexpensive [pricewatch.com]), that is, if you were an early adopter of a motherboard that supported upward compatability.
            • So you bought an expensive motherboard and replaced the cpu a few months after you bought it. But you just said cpu power is irrelevant for game performance so why bother?

              The reason almost nobody puts a geforce 3 in a pentium II 233 is that its an upgrade that costs way too much for the performance gain. If you have that kind of money you are likely to have money for a more modern pc as well. I actually ran the early demos of unreal tournament on my PII 233 with a riva 128 (software rendering only). Even though it was painfully slow it was playable. On my current PC it runs smoothly at a modest resolution of 800x600. The game does not become more entertaining if you put in more expensive hardware which is why I'm still sticking with the voodoo 3.
      • it runs wolfenstein 3d just fine (ok barely but it's playable)

        Dude, my 486 used to play Wolf 3D!

        Oh, you meant Return to Castle Wolfenstein....

        • Yeah that's right :-). But it runs wolf 3d fine too!!
          • Ironically, no. Most modern machines can't play Wolf3D anymore because none of their hardware (sound cards generally) is supported in DOS anymore. Not that it matters since they can't run Wolf3D from Win2k or WinXp anyway.

            This has bit me recently when I felt a hankering for some classic games, only to discover that my hardware isn't compatable anymore, also, some old games can't throttle down big beefy processers enough anymore and play way too fast.
            • Actually, after I installed RTCW, I got the urge to play the original. I installed it, told XP to run it in 95 emulation mode, and it plays beautifully. (BTW, my sound card is a bit dated...it's an AWE 64.) But, the speed was just as I remembered it.
              ..nothing like strafing around a dead nazi and watching it spin and follow you in 2d because the back was never rendered/implemented ...kind of creepy actually.
            • Get mo'slo or Turbo to scale back the processor. While many sound cards don't work anymore, win98 still plays most, if not all games, under DOS.

              old DOS compatibility is one of the primary factors behind me not upgrading to XP, and not staying with ME(it's sad performance being the other reason).
    • Unreal 2 / Unreal Tournament 2 is gonna kick ass though ;p
    • all I had to play with was a brick and a rusty bucket. What is it with these kids today and their fancy 'puters! I had plenty o' fun, and I didn't need no fancy-shmantzy GEE-FORCE THREE!

      If a brick and a rusty bucket was good enough for me, it's good enough for them, dag nab it.

  • Gaming news... (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Diabolical ( 2110 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @07:04AM (#2899975) Homepage

    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...

    • Re:Gaming news... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jedrek ( 79264 )
      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.

      Isn't that what topic blocking in your homepage customization is for?

  • Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @07:17AM (#2900000)
    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.

    • >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
      >
      >
      Shrug. Don't sit there and bitch about it. Do what I and a hell of other people have done. Quit buying this new hardware and PC games and get a PS2 or GameCube instead. PC game companies don't seem to have any qualms about abadoning people who don't want to upgrade their hardware everytime a new graphics card or other such stupidity is annouced or comes out on the market so I think it's *PAST* time people start abadoning the PC gaming market in return. I certainly have.
      • I did get a DC and PS2. And yes, there's more variation on the console, at least, there's more emphasis on arcade-style play than exploration and adventure. But the PC games have much more going for it than consoles, and that is that with the right game design, it's very easy for user-created content for a game to be developed and used. The mod scene is HUGE, as well as the numbers of people working on developing new maps and other aspects of the game. You just can't get that in a console, even if you add on a HD and ether connection.

        But here, again, the usermod scene will only be huge if a game is successful. If a game is just the same-old, same-old, people will flee it like rats from a sinking ship after a few months.

      • Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game (Score:1, Interesting)

        by 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.
        • >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.
          >
          >
          Not likely, at least not on the PS2 or GameCube. Final Fantasy X,Devil May Cry and ICO are perfect example of this. All of these games are *beautiful* graphics-wise but it doesn't distract from the gameplay at all. The same can be said about Kinetica and other PS2 games. Now the XBox will most likely will suffer from this disease because of it's PC-based roots of it's hardware and developers.
      • Its 2d only for me on the pc. I have a psx1 and a GBA and that`ll do nicely. I simply cannot be arsed having to get a new version of directx or drivers for my 3d card, or spend twice the price of a PSX2 (or GBA and about 6 full price games) just for a 3d card which will be shite in about 9 months time. Who can be bothered. Its not like the games are worth it anyway. GBA is great for fun, 2d games that dont have anything to prove. PSX1 is great for squillions of cheap, fun games. PSX2 will be sensibly priced later this year. Who needs the stress of a PC involved in gaming - its bad enough trying to use them to get work done.
        • A mistake most people seem to make is assuming that you need top-of-the-line hardware to play games. How about.....NO! Really, your entire comparison is extremely weak. "I use a five year old console because I don't want the best graphics card money can buy"? Understand this: You don't need to buy new hardware every 9 months if you're willing to put up with console quality graphics. Hell, a Geforce 2 MX-200 is pretty easy to get for the price of a new game, and at console resolution (640x480), it runs current games just fine. The arguement you present reads like "I drive a pickup truck rather than a car because I don't like how sports cars made later will be faster".

          Remember these, and you'll live a lot longer.

          1)You don't need the newest hardware to run the latest games. That Nvidia TNT2 many years ago will still run most, if not all, games on the market right now. It'll likely play them well too, as long as you turn down some graphics features. You don't even need more than a gigahertz to play the latest games.

          2)If you buy a PC to play games, you can just set it up and let it sit there. Install the latest drivers at the time you install the card, and leave it at that. Driver updates are nice, and with nvidia, they generally speed up the card, but they really aren't nessessary if the program you want to run works.

          3)It's entirely possible to build a computer which will last for quite a while for less than the price of that ultra-high end video card. Buy intelligently, and choose low cost, high performance components, and you'll have a system which is inexpensive to maintain, and is cheaper to keep up with than the latest console. For instance: I've got a Geforce 2 MX 200 right now. It'll last for quite a while, and judging from the benchmarks in this article, it'll probably run Unreal 2 at decent speeds if I'm willing run at 640x480x16bits, which I am. Even then, I can spend another 100 bucks(the price of maybe two games, quite reasonable) for a Geforce 4 MX when it comes out in march.
          • Several responses
            • Unless you can sucessfully guess which direction games are likely to head, hardware-wise, you will need to upgrade your hardware. Sure, that TNT-whatever card you mention probably works fine if you bought one but if you went with something else you might find yourself trapped at DirectX version 3
            • You do need to upgrade drivers, all the time, if you want to play new games. At least Direct X, if not .DRV files. And some of the older games that need DirectX 3 won't work with the latest version.
            • The only way to have a working games PC is to build it (or have it built) part by part. You can't walk into a store and buy a ready-made, tested, QA-ed PC model from a name brand and expect it to even play the latest games, never known future ones. So you can have a games PC with no support or a games console that's trival to fix/replace.
            And a final point, not necessarily matching the rest of this; What's with the original Crazy Taxi being released on the PS2 even though CT2 is out on the Dreamcast? I mean, don't get me wrong, as a DC owner I'm happy to be able to play the same game as PS2-owning friends, and it's a good game, but doesn't it make the PS2 look a little... redundant?
            • I'll start with your last point first.

              I have no clue. Perhaps it's a grab at the PS/2 market, like "Hey, I love that game! What?! The sequel is only coming out for dreamcast? I've gotta get one! What? 50 dollars? SWEET!"

              ...

              maybe this whole thing has been a clever ploy by Sega to lower prices, and the dreamcast never died at all?

              As for the rest:

              -It's usually obvious when cards come out, based on reviewer slant, which companies will survive. At the time of the TNT, it was either that or the Voodoo(actually, I think voodoo2) if you wanted to buy a card you knew would last. Personally, that's why I bought the Geforce 2 MX. I get enough performance for my needs, and I get a fairly high quality TV-out as well. Everythings a lottery there though, and just as you could have ran out of luck and bought a ViRGE, you could have bought a sega 32x, or a Sega Saturn...or a Sega Dreamcast(this is an awkward pattern, but you get the idea.). The whole industry is rather volitile, so it's a gamble to pick anything up. Just go with who you think will stick around long enough to support your card. I would have sworn 3dfx was unstoppable before the voodoo 5 came out, but then things started to go downhill...

              Games which require DirectX will usually install it during the installation. The process is nearly automatic, so it falls under the category of "I don't need to do anything, why should I care?".

              As for a PC, I think that whole "support" thing is a myth anyway. Oh no! My hard drive just failed! Well, I'll bring it back to the place I bought it from, because they sent me a defective part. Sure, I could get an Compaq, but that's quite a hassle! It's a matter of trying to stay a little informed before you shop. Plan before you put down the cash. Don't be suprised if you end up with a lemon(or a K-Mart blue light PC :) ) if you don't. I ended up buying a really cheap, suprisingly reliable SiS 735 motherboard from PC Chips. Why did I go with that company? Well, Every PC Chips board I've owned in the past has been slow and unstable, but -- BUT! I did the research this time into the issues I was worried about (broken PCTEL modem, general slowness, instability, lockups), and after learning about the board, and it's twin (the EKsomething...), and all the praise it got from users and press, I went with it, after I also tried to find out it's weaknessess(note: The only weakness I found was that people still don't trust PC Chips.)

              ...and a Console is much harder to fix than a PC. Really, the modular design of a PC just can't be beaten for repair purposes. Even replacing broken components is just as easy. Just think smaller. Don't ask for a refund on the entire PC because the CD-ROM died, just ask for a new CD-ROM. 50 bucks if you're out of warantee, rather than the cost of a whole new console,
    • Amen to that. However, the gaming trend won't shift from bells and whistles to inovation until the market does too. That won't happen for a while. If people are buying stuff that looks good, (which they are) why would a company spend the time and effort to make a game with a real plot?
    • I haven't had any cause to moan about a lack of inovation since I've had my Dreamcast (which is quite a while). With titles such as Samba De Amigo, Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer and more recently Rez to name but a few, you can hardly say that all developers are relying on graphics over gameplay. Admittedly most of the public out there decided not to buy into the latest Sega console preferring instead to get there next fix of dull games such as Fifa. You can't blame games developers when people won't go out and buy something that doesn't have a brand name.
    • And also there are games like EverQuest.

      It has always had more depth of play than simple shooters, but now requires a reasonably high end computer to be able to play. I upgraded to a Geforce 3 Ti 200 for it and it made a nice difference to my frame rate.

      So there are games out there which have some depth, and are starting to use the graphics capabilites. They'll probably never be as fast or nice looking as a single player shooter, but they are trying to solve other problems.
    • You're right. Many of the old arcade games (say, donkey kong, pac-man, etc) and even many of the games for the 2600 were better than alot of games now, even though the graphics weren't anywhere close. Why? They were more original. Granted it's easier to be original when there's little competition. Heck, it wasn't hard to envision a game like EQ back before the www or before I knew of the interenet ("wouldn't it be cool if there was a large bards tale game on a nation wide bbs?").
      • I've always wondered if a lot of the "older games are better" feelings are caused by people either reminicing about their younger gaming days or simply enjoyed them more because they were younger. I remember having a great time playing NES games, but when I play them nowadays they don't pack as much punch as I had remembered.

        For an original game, try calling your barber a pansie and see what fun adventure can be had!
        • Well, maybe it's just a matter of having a large collection of older games from which you can pick out the true gems. Sure, we all remember Donkey Kong, Pac Man and Mario, and we claim these games (or others, if you're so inclined) are proof that "older games are better", but we conveniently forget about all the crap titles that came out as well. Guess what? Last year there was a slew of crap games and maybe one or two good ones, just like in 1982.
    • My current hopes are pinned on Grand Theft Auto 3. The PS2 version is good, both in the graphics & gameplay department. The game is played 3rd person, rather than overhead & that really opens up the freedom movement and immmersion of the game. The PC port comes out at the end of March (along with KDE 3 and (possibly) Mandrake 8.2, April should be fun.)

      Alex
      • Not to mention the ability to beat the crap out of cops. :-)

        (I'm gonna get modded into the basement for this one)

    • Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NutscrapeSucks ( 446616 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @08:28AM (#2900172)
      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.
      • I guess another reason UT is popular is the hours and hour of fun you can have playing CTF picking a nice high place with a sniper rifle and get that one-shot one-kill perfect.

        One of the major cause of the deterioration of games is everything is geared for network games where things need to happen fast. Even strategy games like Call to Power II has basically become an exercise in swarming your enemy with 12-unit archers. I hope they don't make Master of Orion III (whenever it will come out, if it does) that suckful - MOO 2 network play was slow but it at least required actual strategy (once you go beyond the 2-shot missle boat phase).
      • My experience have been the exact opposite of this. While most Q3A-based games I've played seems fluid and ran well on my Celeron450/TNT1 setup, Unreal-based games seemed much more choppy. Also, UT itself had a tendencey to load things from the disk _after_ the game had started (and went on like that for atleast the first minute), resulting in even choppier framerate.
        But then again, the article states that the old Unreal engine is way more CPU than GPU intensive. How much horsepower did your i810 PC have?
        • Depends. In my experience, Unreal engine games tend to be choppy on most hardware, but at least they work. If your hardware can't handle a Q3A engine game, however, you're pretty much screwed.
        • The box would have been considered pretty high-end for an office machine: Dell P3-800 or something (might have been i815 if that matters). Still couldn't play Quake III.

          I've also played UT on a PII-400 with an unacellerated RagePro (NT4) and it was OK for LAN play, although it had 128MB of RAM. Maybe the choppyness you noticed is swapping.

      • ...and find an employer which gives you a kickass gaming machine to work on.

        (Dual P4 Xeon/1GB/Geforce3 here :)

      • 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)

        Every review I've seen says that UT is heavily CPU bound (including that Anandtech video card review posted eariler today). High-end CPUs are probably far more common than high-end video cards. You can't buy less than 700Mhz nowadays, but you can still get crappy onboard video. If UT framerates really tie in so well to CPU performance, that might explain its popularity.

        On the other hand, I remember getting 30FPS from a K6-2 333 and a Matrox G200 in QIII, then seeing that jump up to 50-60 with a Celeron 533, then up to 120 or so with a GeForce DDR (all at 640x480, but 32-bit color and all special effects). So I'm not so confident about your claim that QIII needs serious hardware. I bet that a PII and a TNT2 would be playable. The problem is, you can still buy computers even today with Trident Cyberblade UMA-based video, which isn't even as good as that :)

    • 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

      Give me a break. This is a tired old cliche that someone is guaranteed to haul out of the attic every few months and beat on for a while, trying to sound wise.

      It's a truism, alright? Everyone knows that you can make shitty games with great technology, and great games with shitty technology. The fact remains that more resources (CPU, memory, gigapixels, etc.) give developers more options, and allow them to produce a product that is closer to the concept in their head.

      Do you really think movies would be better today if they were all in grainy black & white, with a mono soundtrack? It's only the pseudointellectual fine-arts undergrads that think so. The fact that you CAN make a great movie with old tech, doesn't mean that's the best or only way to do it. Color and high quality sound give producers BETTER TOOLS to create the great (or shitty) movies that they're capable of.

      • Yes, given better hardware and tools, game makers will continue to put out good games. Top of my head, Black and White is leaps and bounds in terms of both game play and A/V stuff than Populous (though still a great game in of itself). But this is because there were strides not only in graphics, but in baseline RAM configurations, sound cards, storage space, etc.

        However, the problem that others have alluded to is that we are seeing development in the video card technology that appears to be much much faster relative to baseline CPU, RAM, HD, and other hardware developments (Or, better put, video card tech is outdoing Moore's law, but nothing else is). Because the video card arena is booming, the game designers continue to add more and more graphics features that take advantage of the new cards. But because it *seems* they are developing around the new features of these graphics cards, other features of the games go on the wayside. A good explain I remember of late was Summoner. That came out shortly after particle effects were introduced. And hoooo-boy, did the game use particle effects. But as for game-play, it just wasn't there.

        And yes, a film might be great even if filmed today in b&w with mono sound, if it also had a great script, great acting, and great directing. If the B&W motif added to the overall impression of the script, all the better. And there are still numerous games that come out that don't use all the available bells and whistles of modern hardware, but have excellent gameplay that keeps them at the top of the best sellers list. Roller Coaster Tycoon: 2D, simple stereo sound, but yet was super addictive and fun to play. Similarly, when SimGolf (also 2D) comes out in a few weeks, I expect a similar rise to the top.

        A good game in today's age is one that targets playability on a hardware generation one back from the current level. Example: Today, baseline machines are 1.6-2.0GHz, 256Megs of RAM, 40gig HD and GF2 or equivalent cards. So if I was developing a game, I'd aim to make sure it was playable on 1.0-.4 GHz machines with 128Megs, installed in under a gig of space, and aiming at the original GF line of cards. I'd have hooks in the code that would take advantage of better hardward specs, but the game would still be playable without those. This way, not only do I have sales from owners of current baseline machines, but as well as from 1-1.5 yr old systems as well.

        • Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game (Score:4, Insightful)

          by uebernewby ( 149493 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @10:47AM (#2900788) Homepage
          game makers will continue to put out good games. Top of my head, Black and White

          Hmm... I'd say you just named the one title most of my friends (and myself) consider to be a prime example of "looks good but sucks". No one I know played it for more than a few hours, because in the end it turned out to be Populous With Extras That Take Away The Fun. I'm really glad I was smart enough to try the warez version instead of coughing up the full USD 50 for it like most of my buddies.
    • I've got a very bad feeling that the gaming industry is heading towards a black hole of development...

      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... then all you've got is a pretty looking game that no one is going to buy.



      Ummmm... this problem's been around since the days of the Amiga. Given that Moore's Law has more lives than a herd of cats in a clone factory, there will always be plenty of games that feature style over substance, just like every other kind of media. As long as there are serious game enthusiasts in the world like you and me, there will always be good games to find, even if they are harder to find.

      One example: id gave us "Doom", Irrational gave us "System Shock"

      Doom blew everyone away with its revolutionary 3D engine, but the game was pointless. Fun, but pointless, and got old fast. Same with the bazillion Doom-clones that came out soon after (including everything id has done since), but then came "System Shock", which I hadn't even heard of until after the fact, which took the Doom-style 3D engine and put a real plot with lots of interesting backstory, role-playing elements, and world that didn't consist of endless brown labyrinths.

      Did "System Shock" do incredibly well? I doubt it sold anywhere near what id's software sells (even on a bad day), but I will always remember it as one of my favorite games ever (same with "SS2").

      There are only so many hours in a day, if you are discriminating about what you purchase, I think you will find there are more really good games out there than you could ever play.

      • Re:Fast, Hard-core 3D GFX != Good game (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @10:50AM (#2900797) Homepage Journal

        Doom blew everyone away with its revolutionary 3D engine, but the game was pointless. Fun, but pointless, and got old fast

        Nice job with revisionist history there. The reality, of course, is that for the overwhelming majority of people Doom was extremely engrossing (the classic is jumping out of your seat when one of those red bull things appeared) and was directly responsible for billions of hours of slack time. Duke Nukem 3D was very similar in that it's a simple concept, but I played that game multiplayer for hours upon hours upon hours.

        including everything id has done since

        Now this is just dumb. While I haven't ever really gotten into Q3, Q2 gave me thousands of fun hours, especially with the mods. The Quake series, and this is something that many pundits fail to realize, is more of a sport than a RPG : You excel and because exemplary in it just like you would perfecting the perfect dive or running the 10s 100m, and it's the same sort of quest for perfection that draws people to excel. When I see complaints about the Quake series I often wonder if these people expect some RPGing to break out in the middle of the Olympics : Maybe the downhill skiers can have a pseudo hill economy. I mean otherwise they're just falling with gravity right?

        The whole point of this? Don't discount a game just because it's not a genre that you prefer, and don't presume that if an element works in one game (i.e realism, or RPG factors, etc.) that therefore it should be in all games.

        • You seem to have missed my point. I wasn't stating that Doom didn't or shouldn't have done well, or that people didn't or shouldn't have liked it, just that it wasn't a game that I found deeply engrossing, nor did I find it to have any real interest longevity as a game _for me_.

          Sure it's fun to blow stuff up, but let's face it, every game that id has made since Wolf3D has been one where you run around in a maze and shoot things. Period. Now, obviously a lot of people like this or these guys wouldn't be making money hand-over-fist rehashing the same idea every time the computer hardware gets better.

          But, my point goes back to the original poster who worried that developers would forsake coming up with good ideas for simply making prettier pictures with the newest hardware.

          Quake, for the most part, would be Doom, or even Wolf3D but for the massively improved hardware capabilities. Does that discount the kungfu of the guys bright enough to make our beige boxes into VR combat simulators? No, these guys are sharp, but no one can argue that any of those games are very innovative or a more-than-incremental departure from what has gone on before. That's not a bad thing from a marketing point of view. After all, how many people watch hours upon hours of football even though the game hasn't changed radically in 100 years or so. The angle I was taking is that when you want to find something new, something that you really have never seen before, something revolutionary, not evolutionary, you are just going to have to look a little harder.

          The FPS games owe as much to the hardware they run on than the software they are. Master of Orion will run on a 386, and it's as much fun to play now as it was in 1993, despite the crude graphics and interface. I think playing Wolf3D now would be pretty tedious compared to in 1992, after seeing what can be done these days.

          The Wolf3D->Doom->Quake evolution is fine and shows great technical achievement, and is fun to look at (at least if you're into twitching crucified bodies, and clouds of arterial spray), but it wasn't until games like System Shock, Thief and even Descent that there was _game innovation_ rather than _technology innovation_ in the FPS genre beyond what was done in the Wolf3D.

          Do you see the difference?

  • Prerelease games for benchmarking? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am I the only one that thinks it's a bad idea to judge how a game will perform on certain hardware before the code has been optimized for a full blown release, or are these games already more or less "complete" and waiting to be released for marketing reasons?

  • Bummer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Friday January 25, 2002 @07:52AM (#2900041) Homepage Journal
    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_

  • Kyro II (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @07:56AM (#2900052) Homepage Journal
    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...
    • Now, if only they would release those Linux drivers...

      Damn right.. I had a Prophet 4500, but after waiting for 4 months for a driver for X I swapped it for my grandfather's GeForce 2 MX Dual Head.
      The GF2MX is nowhere near as smooth as the 4500, but still capable of playing RTCW at an acceptable speed (shame it can't fix the Nazi's AI.. ;) ) and I can run an accellerated X display on it. Best of all I now have dual monitors!! To anyone who hasn't tried it, getting a dual head display is the same feeling as moving from a 15" to a 17" monitor. You'll wonder how you ever lived without.

      Andy
  • Isn't the reason to buy an 8500 or a GF3 so that you can play tomorrow's games? There are very very few that actually challenge today's hardware in a cutting edge PC. I guess I just saw the results I expected to see when I bought my 8500 a while ago. Nice to know I'm not totaly screwed.
  • Anand refrained from guessing why Geforce3 Ti did better at the higher res. Anyone know the architecture of both well enough to guess why that is so?

    At the lower res the 8500 was faster, but what percentage of the gamers play below 1024 x 768? I haven't set the resolution game to below 1024 x 768 for over 2.5 years. The results were interesting, though it would have been nice if Anand posted 1 or 2 screen shots, especially one of the bug mentioned.

  • I work with the engine every day.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25, 2002 @08:32AM (#2900188)
    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)
  • with those that bemoan the dearth of *new* games that actually have a compelling plot and/or gameplay that take advantage of this kick-ass hardware. The last game that I thought was really compelling (that was new) was 7th Guest. That came out years ago. I think it was around that time that Civ II came out as well. Now we're surrounded by FPS and that seems to be about it.
    • While I agree that Quake/Unreal are just fun, violent, eye-candy, there are some great games in the FPS genre. Half-Life and System Shock 2 both have good puzzles (not just the "find the key to open the door"), suspense, and strategic elements.

  • Apostrophe (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 )
    > (Geforce 3 ti's and upper class Radeon's)

    The apostrophe is never for pluralizing words. What is wrong with "Geforce 3 TIs and upper class Radeons"?
    • What is wrong with "Geforce 3 TIs and upper class Radeons"?

      What's wrong is that you have butchered the capitalization of a proper name. The product name is "GeForce3 Ti".

      "GeForce3 Tis" ends up parsing as a different word entirely, so the apostrophe is a useful separator.

  • D3D vs OpenGL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BadBlood ( 134525 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @09:00AM (#2900284)
    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.
    • My question here is what is going to happen to OpenGL with Microsoft's acquisition of the patents? Did they acquire OpenGL to enhance it? My guess would be that like just about anything else Microsoft has purchased, they will take what they can from it and then kill it. Alternatively, I suppose they could have purchased the rights to it to try and make OpenGL die faster. My hope is that OpenGL will continue to be developed (perhaps by Apple).
    • well, OpenGL is dead. MS bought it and now they will kill it to make D3D the only way on a PC.

  • Ultimate 3D quality... plus Blast from the Past 3D (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @09:07AM (#2900324) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Just LOOK at the specs required to run the latest engine in top notch mode and get decent framerates - painful!!

    However the orginal Unreal was one of the reasons I shelled out for a PII 233 and a 12MB voodoo way back then. It was gorgeous and wonderful havnt a system capable of allowing me to lead the pack in deathmatches.
    Guess its time to sell the children again *sigh*

    Point is that this is a engine/game that I WILL upgrade for ( I bet DNF ends up being delayed while they port to it ) and Im sure lots of other peeps will.....I guess games still are driving hardware sales :)

  • They should have renamed the executable to quack3.exe before benchmarking :)

    Kidding aside, it's cool to see Radeon 8500 definitively beat out the more expensive competitor in a next gen game, but of course, as anandtech points out, there was a bug with fog in the ATI driver which may have helped performance as a side effect. Now the question is how long until the linux drivers support some sort of hardware accelerated 3D on 8500 chips.

    Also, in XFree 4.2.0, are XVideo overlays working for Radeon 8500? All I see is 2D is supported, but 3D is not, and 2D "supported" could mean a lot of things. Also, does the GATOS stuff work with the 8500DV?

    I've been considering purchasing an All-in-Wonder 8500DV, but if good support is not coming soon, I might hold off...
    • I've been considering purchasing an All-in-Wonder 8500DV, but if good support is not coming soon, I might hold off...

      Make that two interested people. I am Planning on building a dual athlon mpx chipset dream machine in a few months. Right now 8500dv is my prefered card. One small problem for ATI though, I don't even own a supported Microsoft OS. Linux only.

      • Well, judging from my new research, at least the 2D and TV functionality work fine, but 3D support is uncertain.....

        The Radeon All-In-Wonder 7500 will probably have full support in short order following its release, so I may just go with that instead. ATI doesn't seem to be too supportive of dri so much, but they do seem to be supporting the GATOS efforts thoroughly. If 8500DV will not have 3D support in the near future, there is no point in me getting it, but the 7500 might fit my purposes....

  • ?? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Sj0 ( 472011 )
    Is there any point? With Geforce 4 MXs around the corner at a very affordable price(it looks like they'll debut at around 100-120 dollars), does it really matter if todays uber-cards get whipped?

    Granted, some people spent big bucks for their Geforce 3 Tis, but they will still be able to play games, just not at the bleeding edge anymore. That's a main point of the video card industry -- it's fast, so don't feel bad when your card is not high end enough to run at max detail anymore.

  • I wonder how JC & Id are approaching this... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wrinkledshirt ( 228541 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @09:51AM (#2900509) Homepage
    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?
  • Did anyone else notice that the drivers used were the WHQL versions?

    With the 23.11s being a major culprit in the infinate loop error problem and the 8500's 3286s being replaced with a newer version that is WHQL certified (6014) which is availible publicly from windowsupdate.com, how relevant are the results, especially for the 8500?

    I know that my score in the Nature test went from an average of 30 FPS to 45 when I went to the 60xx series of drivers.

    Moreover, people are showing huge OpenGL speed differences in the leaked 6018s that are floating around at http://www.rage3d.com

    In the end, is this a real test of where these cards will be when the game actually comes out?

    I don't think it is.

  • Their charts only showed the average frames per second, which is nice to know. But if I am looking at a card, I don't want to see wildly diverging frame rates... I think they should have an extra factor on their charts showing the slowest frame rate noted during the fly by.

    34 fps might be alright if you never dip below 30. But I seriously doubt that to be the case.

    Maybe they should even give a percentage of time during the fly by spent at less than 30 fps.
  • The code and the hardware are distant cousins. They don't talk to each other. They coexist. And they rarely see each other except at Christmas. Like testing WinXP binaries on a Commodore running an emulator. Try testing "future" software on "future" hardware. Too much BS here to suit me. (Carmack doesn't have a clue about such stuff.....all bow down and weep.)

  • Wow. A lot of misconceptions floating around... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheGreatGraySkwid ( 553871 ) on Friday January 25, 2002 @12:01PM (#2901261) Homepage

    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. [ina-community.com]

    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.

  • ... with a kick ass piece of hardware like a GFX accelerator (any 3D card qualifies) is write stuff that uses it yourself. Just buying one to play the latest game seems like a tragic waste of an amazing piece of technology to me ...

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