Date:
Monday , December 10, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Unreal Tournament 3 Gameplay Performance and IQ

The multiplayer juggernaut Unreal Tournament III is upon us! We're run it through the [H] video card gauntlet finding the best gaming on newer video cards and which ones have IQ issues. We have interesting results to show using GeForce 8800 GT, GTX, and GTS as well as Radeon 3850 and 3870 video cards

Introduction

For anyone who may have been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years, Unreal Tournament III (UT3) was finally released this November, to an anxiously awaiting crowd of ravenously hungry FPS gamers. Powered by the over-hyped Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) technology, UT3 has tremendous shoes to fill. The Unreal Tournament franchise has been a multiplayer FPS benchmark for years, having always provided advanced visuals (for its various iterations) and super-fast, energetic gameplay. UT3 promises to bring more of the same great gameplay experience, and to raise the bar to hitherto unseen heights with a density of detail that is unrivaled in today's games.

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Unreal Tournament III comes to us in the unenviable position of being the follow-up one of the most popular multiplayer First-Person Shooters there ever was: Unreal Tournament 2004. UT'04 was powered by Unreal Engine 2.5 and introduced vehicular and objective-based combat to the UT series and began the larger than life artistic style that persists in UT3.

UT3 offers several modes of gameplay, but interestingly enough, there are a couple of modes missing from its predecessor. Bombing Run, a sort of soccer-based game mode, and Assault, which pitted one team against another in an asymmetric battle with linear objectives, are both gone for UT3. But good old-fashioned Deathmatch is still there, along with its Team and 1-on-1 flavors. Capture The Flag (CTF) returned, along with "Vehicle CTF" with large maps to facilitate players with various kinds of ground and aerial assault vehicles. The Onslaught mode introduced by UT'04 is back, but was modified and renamed "Warfare". In Warfare mode, players fight for control over strategic Nodes in order to make the other team's Power Cores vulnerable to attack. Warfare differs from Onslaught with the addition of 2 gameplay items. First is the Orb, which allows the instantaneous capture of any node, whether friendly or neutral. Second, the addition of the hoverboard (accessible by pressing 'Q') allows players previously on foot to traverse the expansive Warfare maps relatively quickly.

Technology

The Unreal Engine 3 was first shown several years ago, and showed some of the most detailed scenes we had ever seen rendered in real time. It has been used in quite a few games since then, including (but not limited to) Rainbow Six Vegas, BioShock, and Gears of War. UE3 has been licensed by a number of publishers for a multitude of other games still in development. The feature list for UE3 is staggering. Anyone interested in the technical aspects of the engine should read the offical Unreal Technology site dedicated to UE3.

As impressive as UE3 is, it is not without its limitations. Most infamously, it is conspicuously lacking AA support on DX9 and DX10 hardware currently. While many people feel that lacking proper support for AA is as good as suicide for a game, we take a more cautious approach to the issue. Some games simply don't need AA to look good. Some games employ post-processed lighting techniques which can diffuse hard edges and cause AA to not be a significant issue. Some games, though, desperately need AA to look their best. In short: if the gameplay experience is adversely affected by aliasing, lack of proper AA support can be troublesome. If not, then it's just not a big deal.

Testing

Today, we will be testing Unreal Tournament III on six video cards from NVIDIA and ATI. In the High-end, we have the GeForce 8800 GTX, the new GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, and the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB. From the performance class, we have the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB, the new ATI Radeon HD 3870, and the new ATI Radeon HD 3850. These products are being grouped together in the following graphs based on performance levels we have observed using our highest-playable evaluation method.