Unreal Tournament III System Requirements Released!

Where are you lot getting the idea that UT3 has anything to do with DX10? It's a DX9 game that they've said might be patched to DX10 features if you have them at some point in the future.
 
thelonecrouton said:
Where are you lot getting the idea that UT3 has anything to do with DX10? It's a DX9 game that they've said might be patched to DX10 features if you have them at some point in the future.
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Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3 uses deferred shading to accelerate dynamic lighting and shadowing. Integrating this feature with multisampling requires lower-level control over FSAA than the DirectX9 API provides. In Gears of War on Xbox 360, we implemented multisampling using the platform's extended MSAA features. On PC, the solution is to support multisampling only on DirectX 10.

PCGH: Can you at this point of development tell our readers what kind of hardware will be required to play the game with all detail in 1024x768 (No FSAA/AF) and 1.600x1.200 (with 4xFSAA - if available - and 8:1 AF)? Will there be any fallback modes for gamers with older hardware like Shader 2.0 cards?

Tim Sweeney: Optimization is still ongoing, so these numbers change on a daily basis. In general, our Unreal Engine 3 games run quite well on DirectX9 class hardware that NVidia and ATI released in 2006 and later, and amazingly well on the high-end cards including DirectX 10 cards. We also support Shader Model 2.0 hardware with minimal visual difference.

PCGH: Can player speed up performance remarkably by buying a second card for a SLI- or Crossfire system? Have you already measured/experienced differences between those two systems?

Tim Sweeney: We test on SLI configurations on a regular basis. There impact at higher resolutions is significant so if you want to experience the full beauty at high resolutions this is a great way to preserve performance while doing so. We haven't had a chance to run on Crossfire yet, but would expect similar results.

PCGH: Could you in a couple of sentences sum up the technical as well as the visual highlights of the Unreal Engine 3 and especially UT 3 that will make your product superior to other competitors like Crytek (Cry Engine 2) id (doom 3 engine with megatexture technique)?

Tim Sweeney: We let our games speak for themselves.

PCGH: When did you get your first next-gen-hardware (DX 10-cards) to fiddle apart from console stuff?

Tim Sweeney: Our early access to hardware is generally covered by non-disclosure agreement.

PCGH: What is your experience with Nvidia's and Ati's next generation graphics hardware? Could you already make a statement which card will be better for UT 3, the 8800 GTX or the Radeon 2900 XTX?

Tim Sweeney: The relative performance scores between NVidia's and ATI's best cards vary from day to day as we implement new optimizations. But, for the past year, NVidia hardware has been ahead fairly consistently, and a few months ago we standardized on Dell XPS machines with GeForce 8800 GTX's for all of our development machines at Epic.

PCGH: Are there any plans at Epic to upgrade the engine for DX 10? Have you already made experience with Microsoft's new API?

Tim Sweeney: Yes, we'll ship Unreal Tournament 3 with full DirectX 10 support. Support for multisampling is the most visible benefit. We're also able to use video memory more efficiently on Windows Vista under DirectX 10, enabling a given machine to use higher-detail texture settings than are possible in Windows Vista under DirectX 9. Most of Unreal Engine 3's effects are bound by fill-rate rather than by higher-level features like hardware geometry processing, so the real impact of DirectX 10 is incrementally better performance rather than entirely new features.

PCGH: Do UT 3 gamers profit from a 64 Bit environment? Will there be a 64 Bit version? What are the advantages of the 64 Bit version? Are there any differences as far as visuals or performance is concerned?

Tim Sweeney: We're testing Unreal Tournament 3 with Windows Vista 64-bit to assure compatibility, but we're planning to wait for the OS and application base to mature before doing anything further to really exploit 64-bit.

We were the first developer to port to the 64-bit environment back in 2004, with 64-bit Windows XP and Unreal Tournament 2004. We were very eager to embrace Windows Vista 64-bit also, and hoped to have moved all of our development machines over to it by now. Unfortunately, the software and driver compatibility still isn't quite there. The base OS is very stable, and it's a joy to work with in isolation. But, then, you need to print something, or run Max or Maya along with a collection of third-party plug-ins, and it all unravels. I'm sure the issues will be worked out with service packs and app updates within the Windows Vista generation, as machines with 4-8GB are finally becoming economical, and could be mainstream in the next 12 months.

PCGH: How important will main memory be for the overall performance? How much memory would you recommend?

Tim Sweeney: We require at least 512MB, and you'll want at least 2 gigabytes for optimal performance and detail. Unreal Engine 3 is very scalable in terms of memory usage, so it runs well on low-memory machines at the low texture-detail setting.

PCGH: It is well known that your engine supports multi core CPUs. What is the maximum number of threads the engine can calculate? What is the performance gain when you play UT 3 with a quad core CPU? Will the engine even support future CPU with more than four cores?

Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3's threading support is quite scalable. We run a primary thread for gameplay, and a secondary thread for rendering. On machines with more than two cores, we run additional threads to accelerate various computing tasks, including physics and data decompression. There are clear performance benefits to quad-core, and though we haven't looked beyond that yet, I expect further gains beyond quad-core in future games within the lifetime of Unreal Engine 3.

PCGH: Can UT 3 be played with full detail on a single core machine?

Tim Sweeney: You can play UT3 at any detail level on any machine; the dependent variable is the frame rate! If you have a fast GPU (and thus aren't GPU-bound), then you'll notice significant performance gains going from a single-core PC to a dual-core PC, and incremental improvements in going to quad-core, at a constant clock rate.

PCGH: Are there any things you learned while developing Gears of War for next gen consoles that you can now benefit from when finalizing UT 3 for the PC?

Tim Sweeney: The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC. The division of UE3's rendering and gameplay into separate threads, implemented originally for 360, has brought even more significant gains on PC where there is a more heavyweight hardware abstraction layer in DirectX, hence more CPU time spent in rendering relative to gameplay.

Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the $10-20M range. You need to run on ordinary mass-market PCs as well. In reading PC gaming websites, one might get the impression that everyone owns a dual-core PC with a pair of $600 GPUs in SLI configuration, but the reality is very different. More than 80% of PCs sold today are still single-core, and have very low-end DirectX9 graphics capabilities. Unreal Engine 3 supports those configurations well.
(Thilo Bayer)
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http://www.pcgameshardware.de/?article_id=602522
 
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Those are unbelievable system specs, my pc should be able to run it at full whack. I know UT have always been a good with running on a wide variety of systems, but those just seem too low. Especially with the specs some UT3 engine powered games have been needing, but hoping we get a demo to try before the release to really see.
 
Proc said:
Those are unbelievable system specs, my pc should be able to run it at full whack. I know UT have always been a good with running on a wide variety of systems, but those just seem too low. Especially with the specs some UT3 engine powered games have been needing, but hoping we get a demo to try before the release to really see.
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Shame about the FSAA implementation.
 
sr4470 said:
Shame about the FSAA implementation.
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Why? Vista on DX10 gives better MSAA performance than in DX9 due to the hardware being able to manage it more efficiently with DX10 - I see nothing wrong with this other than people not willing to get with the times!

If you're a PC gamer then a half decent DX10 card isn't that expensive and Vista is only £64~ to have this experience.

but like he said, UE3 will look great on almost any spec hardware. If you wnat the nice extra visual punch then you will need the nice extra hardware!
 
mrk said:
Why? Vista on DX10 gives better MSAA performance than in DX9 due to the hardware being able to manage it more efficiently with DX10 - I see nothing wrong with this other than people not willing to get with the times!

If you're a PC gamer then a half decent DX10 card isn't that expensive and Vista is only £64~ to have this experience.

but like he said, UE3 will look great on almost any spec hardware. If you wnat the nice extra visual punch then you will need the nice extra hardware!
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I understand your point, but I'm considering all the people with high-end DX9 cards, eg 7800\7900 series, that would work fine using AA in DX9. Surely it isn't difficult to add that into the render path? HL2 even had paths for the ATI Rage\3dfx Voodoo...
 
Well, blow me. Guess us linux/mac freaks will have to wait for the Mighty Bosses of GL to pull their fingers out and release a multisampling extension. No point buying a DX10 card until then I suppose. Good job as I'm skint. :mad:

/pokes head out from under rock, heads over to Epic forums... :p
 
Nymins said:
Pretty damn low recommended requirements imo. I should be able to play it pretty well then :)
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My rule of thumb when dealing with publishers specs:

-Completely ignore the min specs
-Look at the Recommended Specs
-Add 50% to the cpu, ram and gfx power
-That's your new MIN spec for good performance.
 
HangTime said:
My rule of thumb when dealing with publishers specs:

-Completely ignore the min specs
-Look at the Recommended Specs
-Add 50% to the cpu, ram and gfx power
-That's your new MIN spec for good performance.
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New minimum spec :confused: I highly doubt that something more than a 7800GTX will be the bare minimum requirement to run the game. If you read the previous posts, every UT game has been optimized to hell and back. The game will be extremely scalabe. I think those specs are about right from Epic.
 
I also don't believe those specs.

STALKER for example claims only 1gb ram 'recommended' but it is unplayable with dynamic lighting with just 1gb.
 
Nymins said:
New minimum spec :confused: I highly doubt that something more than a 7800GTX will be the bare minimum requirement to run the game. If you read the previous posts, every UT game has been optimized to hell and back. The game will be extremely scalabe. I think those specs are about right from Epic.
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My 'new min spec' wasn't listed as the 'bare minimum requirement to run the game". I clearly stated that this was for good performance, ie the kind of thing serious gamers want. I don't thing something offering 150% perfomrnace of a x1300 is overkill really.

Regarding UT optimisations, don't forget that UT2003 botmatch was fairly cpu limited and no matter what settings I used I couldn't get consistently high framerates (sure, the average is high, but not min) on my rig at the time.

Also bear in mind that other games we have seen released using the UT3 engine haven't exactly offered blistering performance.
 
HangTime said:
My 'new min spec' wasn't listed as the 'bare minimum requirement to run the game". I clearly stated that this was for good performance, ie the kind of thing serious gamers want. I don't thing something offering 150% perfomrnace of a x1300 is overkill really.

Regarding UT optimisations, don't forget that UT2003 botmatch was fairly cpu limited and no matter what settings I used I couldn't get consistently high framerates (sure, the average is high, but not min) on my rig at the time.

Also bear in mind that other games we have seen released using the UT3 engine haven't exactly offered blistering performance.
Click to expand...

Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the $10-20M range. You need to run on ordinary mass-market PCs as well. In reading PC gaming websites, one might get the impression that everyone owns a dual-core PC with a pair of $600 GPUs in SLI configuration, but the reality is very different. More than 80% of PCs sold today are still single-core, and have very low-end DirectX9 graphics capabilities. Unreal Engine 3 supports those configurations well.
(Thilo Bayer)
 
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