X-bit labs

Unreal Tournament 2004: The Kingdom of Massacre

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov , Alexey Stepin

[ 02/13/2004 | 03:48 PM ]

Epic Games has unveiled demo version of the Unreal Tournament 2004 – a game that a lot of people have been waiting impatiently. The UT2004 is something more than revamped UT2003, even though there are a lot of similarities; the main is violent acts of bloody killing loads of opponents. As every good game, this DirectX 9 title allows benchmarking and today we have some good read for you – 11 graphics cards based on processors from ATI, NVIDIA, S3 Graphics and XGI are benchmarked against each other.

Table of contents:

• Unreal Gets More Reality
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004: What’s New?
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004: Game-Play
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004: Testbeds and Methods
  
• Graphics Cards’ Performance
  
• Onslaught: Torlan demo
  
• Assault: Convoy demo
  
• Capture the Flag: Bridge of Fate demo
  
• Bombing Run: Colossus demo
  
• Death match: Rankin demo
  
• Conclusion: Graphics Cards for UT2004
  
• Conclusion: Graphics Demands of UT2004
  

Unreal Gets More Reality

The original Unreal game released in May 1998 changed the way people treated computer games in general and first person shooters in particular. For the very first time a game was truly beautiful from esthetic standpoint – there were trees, birds, animals, caverns, ruins and never-before-seen water along with loads of other things that made the crowd to love the Unreal.

A year later Epic Games introduced the Unreal Tournament – a bloody first person combat that really put you into action, a kind of action you would expect from a “tournament” – not so smart as in Counter Strike and not so fast and furious as in Quake III Arena. The community appreciated the Unreal Tournament not only for excellent graphics, perfect weapon and comfortable game play, but also for exciting maps and game-types.

Three years later, in 2002, Epic rolled-out the new Unreal Tournament 2003 with innovative 3D engine, fresh levels, new worlds and incredibly complex and realistic graphics. Now it is early 2004 and the developers are readying the UT2004 – a seriously improved version of the 2003 with just more realism and allure. There is a paradox – while the worlds of Unreal become more and more fabulous, the game really gets more and more realistic.

Hey, are they preparing us for Mars invasion or something? :)