Unreal Tournament 3 CPU & High End GPU Analysis: Next-Gen Gaming Explo

[Maziar]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3127&p=8

We're just getting started with our UT3 performance analysis, but already there are some interesting conclusions to be had. Quite possibly the biggest takeaway from this comparison is the dramatic improvement in multi-threaded game development over the past couple of years. Starting from a point where none of our game benchmarks were multi-threaded just two years ago, here we are today with the latest and greatest from Epic, and seeing huge gains from one to two cores, and promising improvements when moving to four cores.

Quad-core gaming is still years away from being relevant (much less a requirement), but the industry has come a tremendous distance in an honestly very short period of time. We're more likely to have multi-threaded games these days than 64-bit versions of those titles, mostly thanks to the multi-core architecture in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Like it or not, but much of PC gaming development is being driven by consoles, the numbers are simply higher on that side of the fence (even though the games themselves look better on this side).

On the GPU side, NVIDIA of course does quite well with the 8800 lineup, but the real surprise is how competitive AMD is with the Radeon HD 2900 XT. There may be some salvage yet for that architecture, if AMD could only bring out a midrange part that actually offered compelling performance...

 

[colwynstein]

Played the demo and runs smooth with all settings max at 1440x900 even with my system

 

[wingsofzion]

The demo ran smooth for me as well. I played at 1600 x 1200 with all settings jacked up. The machine is a P4 3.2 GHZ, 2GB DDR 533, EVGA 7800GT on a 74GB Raptor. No slow down at all. Only slow down i ever gotten was server lag issues. Other than that it was fast paced gaming and the game looking so great. I wonder if Crysis should have went in this footsteps, a combination of good gaming and graphics and not so resource dependant.

 

[stemnin]

Then Crysis would look like Farcry with the indestructible trees, as opposed to destructible trees lol. I can hardly find any servers, I only see about 4-5 servers with decent ping and players in. The game never goes below 50 fps on my system (it rarely goes that low).

 

[Rabidpeanut]

Same here, but i think that the game is vsynced at 60 or something cause with my hd2900 it never goes over 62, it just sits there the whole time, making me sad. running at1600*1200 and at 1280*960 make no difference to the framerate either.

 

[stemnin]

Yes its got a max of 62 fps, one of the ini files can be changed, I think it's utengine.ini in engine.gameengine part, maxsmoothframe=62, there's a line above that you can set to true or false (which removes the limit), I put that up in the games section somewhere.

 

[Hatman]

I read somewhere that atm its not possible to use high textures on the demo, so when you can should impact performance a bit more but hopefully use a bit better quality settings.

Tbh I wasn't too pleased with the quality in UT3.. didn't give me the wow I was hoping for. Until crysis is out, back to quake wars.