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PC Games (Games)

Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Revealed 85

Posted by Zonk from the winning-the-tourney dept.
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."
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Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Revealed More

Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Revealed

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  • Looks good, and I'll definitely be checking it out. However, I wonder how much of UT3's thunder will be stolen by the gem of pure awesomeness that is TF2? For myself, TF2 is the only game in town for FPS action at the moment. The vehicles in UT3 might be a definite point in its favour, though, so I'm looking forward to the demo that's dropping later today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pengo ( 28814 )


      I am not a typical FPS gamer, but for me TF2 is like giving a fat-man the keys to the twinky factory. I just can't get enough of it!!

      There are only a couple minor complaints about game-balance swirling around (Scouts shooter is a little over the top), but it's a real blast. To get this kind of online experience without having to do any kind of recurring payments is really a nice change from the trend of online-only gaming.

      • There are only a couple minor complaints about game-balance swirling around (Scouts shooter is a little over the top), but it's a real blast. To get this kind of online experience without having to do any kind of recurring payments is really a nice change from the trend of online-only gaming.

        Personally, I'm extremely impressed that they managed to create so fine a balance with so many classes. I also thoroughly enjoy the fact that it's flatly impossible to win without teamwork against opponents of any real skill. I'm hoping that a lot of game companies take note of the graphics too, in the sense that there is a large contingent of gamers out there (I believe) who don't want to have "realistic" graphics, but prefer more stylised visuals. I absolutely love the fact that I can instantly identi

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Puff of Logic ( 895805 )

            There are only a few differences between TFC and TF2... I'm curious why people are so amazed at TF2 when it is a dumbed down version of TFC. Not to say I don't like TF2, it's just that as a TFC addict for 8 years it's amazing that people didn't know about this game...

            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 re

    • They both appeal to different sub-genres of FPS games. TF2 is class based multiplayer, UT3 is more "old-skool" style DM, CTF and other game modes. Apples to Orange mainly.

      • They both appeal to different sub-genres of FPS games. TF2 is class based multiplayer, UT3 is more "old-skool" style DM, CTF and other game modes. Apples to Orange mainly.

        I rather suspected that this would be the case. It's actually nice to have the option, now that I think about it. I've been a huge fan of class-based shooters for a long time now and arguably haven't played "old school" deathmatch play since Quake. Perhaps I'll pick up UT3 to back that old feeling of only giving a crap about me! ;)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )
      I loved the original UT, but didn't like the addition of vehicles in 2k3. Assuming they are similar, it isn't really a plus in my eyes.

      • I loved the original UT, but didn't like the addition of vehicles in 2k3. Assuming they are similar, it isn't really a plus in my eyes.

        Presumably there will be maps on which vehicles are unavailable, so hopefully the back-to-basics deathmatch will be an option on at least some UT3 maps. That said, I was actually intrigued to read about a map in the demo that sounds to be almost entirely vehicle-based. I must confess that flying around in FPS games is loads of fun to me, but I don't much care for ground-based vehicles. That map definitely sounded intriguing though.

      • 2k3's vehicle support was incomplete, and not enabled during the normal course of play. 2k3 was more like a demo for 2k4 than a self-contained game. (I hear they allowed you to get a partial refund on a purchase of 2k4 by providing proof of purchase of 2k3.) 2k4's vehicle support is much more well-rounded and fun, though it still has problems. (maybe I just think so because nothing is fun at 10fps, but meh.)

        -:sigma.SB

      • I skipped over UT2k3 but bought (for my 64bit AMD Linux box) UT2k4 soon after launch after playing the demo. The vehicles make a HUGE difference to the game play, especially on Onslaught mode. Well coordinated teams which are prepared to use the vehicles to gain a strategic advantage rip through the levels. Speed between objectives is one major advantage, as is the heavy weaponry you can bring to bear on choke points.

        Now, if DM is your thing, I can see that the vehicles are merely "meh". If Assault or Ons

    • TF2 doesn't work in Linux. Not even in Cedega.

      I am also saddened by the lack of Portal playing. 49 bucks for the orange box, for nothing at the moment.

      Linux client == Instant Purchase from me
    • TF2 is great for small map tight shooters, ala traditional Quake/early UT style play. Quake Wars, however, is also a very good shooter, and makes a fine addition into the Battlefield/Battlefront/vehicle UT (call it strategic shooter?) FPS sub-genre.

  • Linux but no Mac? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by njfuzzy ( 734116 ) <ian.ian-x@com> on Friday October 12, 2007 @11:42AM (#20955969) Homepage
    That seems odd. A linux client, but not a Mac client? Less than 1% of the desktop market versus around 6% (and much higher outside of business), and they go for the smaller of the two? Or does the summary just leave out the Mac release?
    • You say 1% but that's not in proportion to the number of people who would purchase the game.

      1% is probably an accurate amount of desktops with Linux on in the world but since geeks are more likely to be purchasing UT then your Mum's windows box from the low budget store I would say that the amount is higher then 1% .

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by xhrit ( 915936 )
        That, and there are the linux nerds like me who will purchase one copy for every computer in the house, for when i host lan parties. Next month I will be spending about 500$ on linux games - and that is just quake wars and UT3.
    • A few articles this summer or /. said that it was going to have Windows, Mac, and Linux clients, so I'm assuming that this article just left it out.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Yeah, according to random web chatter, there will be an OS X client using Cider. If there's a Linux client, it's pretty safe to say they'll also have an OS X client, even if the Cider bit is completely off-base.
    • I think this has to do with the fact that UT traditionally also has a linux server version as well. So most of the code is already ported for linux, they go a litter further with the client port as well.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by realmolo ( 574068 )
      It makes sense.

      The Linux client can be a fucking TARBALL and the Linux crowd would be happy. They don't have to package it at all, or even go to much effort to make sure it works well. Linux users (of which I am one, at least part-time) are prepared to jump through hoops to make this game work, and don't expect it be very polished.

      On the Mac side, however, they'd have to actually test the thing and package it correctly and support it. A much more expensive/time-consuming proposition than simply dumping the

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Ant P. ( 974313 )
        Yep, pretty much the same reason I didn't buy UT2k4 until about a year ago. Plus by that time it'd dropped to 1/5th of its original price.

      • Re:Linux but no Mac? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SirTalon42 ( 751509 ) on Friday October 12, 2007 @01:30PM (#20957885)
        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).
      • Boy are we ever. The Linux client that shipped with UT2k4 crashed constantly and we played it anyway. On the up side the performance was better than on windows and after they cleared up the initial issues it was tight as hell.

        Now where the fuck is our editor?!!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ren.Tamek ( 898017 )
      Gears of War and UT3 are coming to the Mac [macworld.com], according to Epic's Mark Rein. Leaving it out of the news post is just an oversight.
  • FYI, the demo was just released today. Talk about being late to the party?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by zariok ( 470553 )
      Beta Demo.
      • Aka public beta. Same thing the UT2003 and UT2004 demos were labeled as. Because Epic is using this to solicit feedback and bug reports from the wild, and generate some buzz for the actual release next month. Good example of why demos should come out before the product launches.
  • The in-box Linux client of UT2004 made several sales of the game for me and my friends. It's one of the few FPS games we've kept playing, and it's still a fun game. Knowing that Linux is inside the retail box means I'll be picking it up ASAP.

    Thank you EPIC!

  • UT3 PC Demo is out NOW! (Score:5, Informative)

    by anti-human 1 ( 911677 ) on Friday October 12, 2007 @11:57AM (#20956285) Journal
    get downloading!
    Worthplaying [worthplaying.com]
    Gamershell [gamershell.com]
    Computer Games.ro [computergames.ro]
    Fileplanet [fileplanet.com]
    3D Gamers [3dgamers.com]

    I just ripped the links off Voodoo Extreme [ve3d.com]. reply with more mirrors!

  • Considering the fact that I already own three games in the Unreal Tournament franchise, how the fourth game in the Tournament series can be called '3' is beyond me...

    1. Unreal Tournament

    2. Unreal Tournament 2003

    3. Unreal Tournament 2004

    4. Unreal Tournament 3 (?)

    Such pedantics will not affect my purchase of said game, however, provided my rig has enough balls to render the game at a reasonable frame rate.

    • UT200X was originally called Unreal Tournament 2. There was a leaked beta before they had the 200X monkier tacked on and the splash screen clearly said "Unreal Tournament 2". The original reason for the year being added one was they planned on annual incremental updates to the game but that didn't pan out. Unreal Tournament 3 was originally UT 2007, but they dropped the year and went back to the normal numbering system.
      • UT 2004 also contained all of UT 2003's content. It was the same game, just a slightly newer edition. Epic even had a mail-in rebate for 2003 owners who purchased 2004, since 2004 was essentially an expansion if you already had 2003.
        • IIRC, the main addition in UT2004 was the vehicles, which may have been Epic's response to Halo's success on the PC.

          personally i liked 2003 better. i dont remember how, but i definitely remember the controls feeling different with 2004, and i had already gotten pretty good with 2003 so it was like starting all over again.
    • heres how it makes sense... 1. UT - unreal engine 2. UT 2003 - unreal 2 engine 3. UT 2004 - unreal 2 engine 4. UT3 - unreal 3 engine
  • FTFS:

    "It turns out that even mid-range cards are going to be more than capable of playing UT3 at impressive image quality levels."

    Actually, no. That looks like crap [pcper.com]. The bridge, the mountain, if you can call it that. And I cherry-picked a good screenshot.

    It doesn't really compare to most modern [enemyterritory.com] games [gamershell.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GeckoX ( 259575 )
      Have to agree, looked at the screenshots and was not impressed at all. Very...meh I guess.
      And it looks like it requires quite a bit of horsepower to boot.

      Ah well, lots of other ways to waste my time right now anyways ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nuzak ( 959558 )
      First thing I noticed was all the craggy rough textured natural look to the UT3 screenshot, compared to the aliasing on the pipes, buildings, and bridge in the Enemy Territory shot. The ET background had some extra mountain polygons, but otherwise didn't have the draw distance.

      Crysis on the other hand is wow. But it's going to need more watts from my GPU than a hair dryer.
    • Man, I hope that screenshot is somehow messed up by image compression or something, because otherwise they're going to need to call it "nearsightedness simulator 2007". The only thing that's not fuzzy as hell is the guy's arm and weapon. Say hello to gaming-induced headaches.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Ant P. ( 974313 )
      Look at it this way - the clever programmers at Epic managed to do for saturation what Doom 3 did for brightness.

  • What? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ahoehn ( 301327 ) <`nh.eoh' `ta' `werdna'> on Friday October 12, 2007 @12:14PM (#20956575) Homepage

    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 [newegg.com].

    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 [pcper.com] 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?

    • Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)

      by p0tat03 ( 985078 ) on Friday October 12, 2007 @12:34PM (#20956947)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by nuzak ( 959558 )
        Having a single 2900 or 88000 is considered "mid-range" on the gamer scene these days. It's seriously out of whack -- not only is the upfront cost high, which I can deal with by waiting a bit, but the power consumptions on these things is outright insane, to the point where it gets really noticeable on the electric bill.

    • 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.

      Did you see the settings at which that those benchmarks were taken? Don't set them that high on a midrange machine.

      I'm in the middle of the download, but I'll post my own results when I get in (Core 2 Duo E6300, 7600GT).

    • 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.

      ...Oh no. Where does that put my AGP 4x dual-CPU 1.25GHz G4 with 2GB of 167MHz DDR RAM? Will I be able to play UT3 on it?

      ...Why is everyone laughing at me?

      -:sigma.SB

      • I can't wait to try it out on my smokin' 2.4Ghz P4, 1GB RAM, 256MB 9600 Pro !!! [sniff] Seriously though, I'll post some low/minimal data when I've got it... just for ha ha's.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by dal11 ( 831361 )
          Good luck :) my Athlon 64 3700 2gb ram and geforce 6800gs choked big time, 800x600 15 fps on simple DM match. According to the requirements I'm at the bottom of the barrel.Were in the same boat. :'( Time to start saving.
          • Interesting... I average 22-25fps in DM at 800x600 (lowest detail settings, of course). The lowest it got was 14 fps when I had a lot of action going on. But I also experienced random freezes. Sometimes it would come out of the freeze and other times I had to kill it. The bummer with killing it was I would have to restart in order to get it to launch again. Well it is a beta! :) The freezes are the worst part. The graphics at the lowest setting reminds me of the days of doom- mmm.... big blocky pixels.
        • It actually CRASHED trying to start it on my 1.6 Core 2 Duo with a... uh... GMA X3100...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by MLS100 ( 1073958 )
      Look at the resolutions used in those benchmarks, 2560x1600 - come on, who owns a monitor that goes up that high?

      At a normal resolution you should see much better numbers.

      I think the point of the article is to really focus on the performance of those video cards, thus they use insane spec hardware to give the video card as much headroom as possible so you know how well each card performs and not to give people a realistic expectation of their system performance.
    • Err... you do know that they did that to isolate the effect of the vid card right?
      You wouldn't want to bench an 8800 Ultra on a P2-300 right? Talk about a Ferrari with golf cart wheels.

  • Poor card coverage IMO (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) * on Friday October 12, 2007 @12:24PM (#20956755)
    Game performance reviews that just target the latest cards annoy me now. A quick look at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html [steampowered.com] 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.
  • They should have at least supplied a torrent... I'm downloading it right now and it is really really slow (think single digit Kb/s - pointless, really).

  • "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."
    i could've swore this title was a ps3-exclusive on the consoles...

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It is - for a limited time.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by evwah ( 954864 )
      are you kidding me? the Unreal Tournament franchise has always had a massive core of PC users. thats where the game exists. it would be suicide for them to release it exclusively on a console that isn't even selling.

      well unless you consider the fact that they are licensing the unreal engine 3... thats where they REALLY get their bread and butter.
  • How am I supposed to play this at work if I can't install it on my Windows XP Pro x64 installation!!?!?? I even ran the installer on a x32 WinXP, getting the .msi from the temp directory and running that and it told me it couldn't load without being run by the setup.exe. Damn them for using lousy installer packaging software.

  • OMFG!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) * on Friday October 12, 2007 @03:15PM (#20959483)
    Whoever designed the front end UI needs SLAPPING. Hard. Very hard. And often.
    • You know I'm not sure which bit puzzles me the most - the "designed for irritation" menu system, or the absolutely dire performance.. Just to put my comments into context - my PC, whilst not exactly cutting edge, is not ancient either, and probably quite typical of PC specs out there today. It's 2-3 years old and runs a 3.2Ghz Prescott P4, with 1Gb of dual channel DDR2, and an nVidia 6800 ultra (in an AGP slot).

      I started off by turning up all the dials to maximum - max detail, texture detail, and maximum

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