Dear Epic Games (Re: Unreal tournament 3)

Too Much Free Time - playing every game because it needs to be done


Dennou Kyuusei Uranai

[by Liberty, October 2007                       [2007-10-23_05:09pm]

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UT3's release date is November 19, 2007
You can preorder the standard or Collector's Edition now!

(This post is specific to the PC version; but you might want to check out the PS3 version and the XBOX 360 version too.)

If you're wondering if your system is up to it, here's a tip: Bioshock uses the same game engine. So all you have to do is search online for FPS ratings (performance ratings/tests) for Bioshock to get the info you need...
There's a demo available as well, so if you have the time, you could install that and see how it does...

Dear Epic -

According to sources online (why the Press Release or your website doesn't come up in searches is something you might want to look into), the "minimum system requirements" for Unreal Tournament 3 list the following video cards:

[NVIDIA 6200+] or [ATI Radeon 9600+] Video Card

Given the amount of marketing spin and varying degrees of misinformation on the internet, how are most of your potential customers supposed to know what video cards rank _above_ and _below_ these models? It's not like Nvidia and ATI necessarily number their models sequentially. (To add to that, the addition of a single letter or number or symbol to a model number apparently implies large differences in performance -- e.g. [6500 GT] vs [6500 GTS], or e.g. the plus [+] symbol.... )

And what about dual card hardware configurations ("SLI" and "CrossFire")?

Please provide a table of video cards that ranks video cards that meet or exceed this "minimum required" benchmark.

Your customers need to know what components in their price range can reasonably be expected to run your product. And the old days of clear "this card is better than that card" days are long gone...

Links and References

1. > Epic Games guy gives some details
http://www.evga.com/gaming/gaming_news/gn_100.asp

Q. Does Unreal Tournament 3 support EAX? Does it use OpenAL like UT2004?

A. On PC , Unreal Engine 3 uses OpenAL for sound, and takes advantage of the
major 3D sound features available in hardware, or in the OpenAL software driver.

Q. Does Unreal Tournament 3 support HDR rendering with Anti-aliasing?

A. Yes, on Windows Vista. On all PC platforms, we support running with 16-bit-per-component frame buffer (64 bits total).
[But] MSAA anti-aliasing support is only enabled on DirectX 10, because the deferred rendering techniques used by the engine require some capabilities not included in DirectX 9.

2. - UT3 System Score Calculator (only provides a _very_ rough idea, and has no info on how it determines scores):
http://gearsforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=577457
  (laptop = 13.83 ? ; big blue = 6.001 ?)


Recommended System Requirements*:

2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
1 GBytes of System RAM
NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space
Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has confirmed [30] that the best quality of graphics in UT3 (i.e.: MSAA anti-aliasing) will only be available to players of Unreal Tournament 3 if they are Windows Vista users who also have a DirectX 10 graphics card.

*(src=wiki)
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