Conclusion

It’s yet too early to make a final conclusion about the game since the demo version of Unreal Tournament 3 demonstrates only a small part of the features that are going to be available in the final version. It is clear, however, that Epic Games has indeed returned to the roots in many respects, and the sequel to the popular series will take the best from UT2003/2004, but will be closer the classic Unreal Tournament. The demo version can already boast high-quality visuals, but its full splendor together with advanced physical effects will only be seen in the published game. As for the spirit of Unreal Tournament, we guess it is present here, but that’s depends on your personal taste, of course.

Our preliminary tests have showed that at this moment the UT3 demo doesn’t have a strong liking or disliking towards products of a particular GPU developer and runs equally fast on ATI Radeon and Nvidia GeForce cards. Compared with some modern games with DirectX 10 support (for details see our article called The Second Encounter: DirectX 10 Games vs. Contemporary Graphics Accelerators), in which even top-end graphics cards can hardly provide a playable speed, Unreal Tournament 3 is a relief. Anyway, we would still recommend purchasing more advanced graphics cards for playing the game if you are going to enable FSAA and other image-enhancing features.

Epic Games has done a good job on the engine and we hope the full version of Unreal Tournament 3 won’t be much hungrier than the demo and won’t require a considerable financial investment into the graphics subsystem.

Since we performed our tests in a demo of the game, we plan to run another round of tests as soon as Unreal Tournament 3 is released officially.