New Technologies in Unreal Tournament 3

Unreal Tournament 3 runs on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 and is actually not the first game to use it. Such titles as Gears of War and BioShock are based on this engine, too. Developed with modern technologies and DirectX 10 capabilities in mind, the engine provides the following things:

• Multi-threaded rendering system that uses capabilities of modern multi-core CPUs
• Support for 64-bit FP HDR with gamma correction
• Support for all modern per-pixel lighting models
• Support for different shadowing methods (that can be used simultaneously) to create high-quality dynamic and static shadows
• Volumetric effects: fog, mist, etc
• Post-effects: motion blur, depth of field, bloom, etc
• Support for dynamically modified landscapes and models with advanced materials, displacement maps, normal maps, etc
• Support for dynamic tessellation
• Advanced particle system with support for a physics model
• Support for the Ageia PhysX engine, including hardware physics accelerators
• Support for complex skeletal animation

You can refer to the developer’s website for more information on Unreal Engine 3. But even without delving into details it is clear that Unreal Tournament 3 has a modern technological foundation that meets today’s standards and provides a reserve for the future.

Unfortunately, there are few setup options available in the demo. You can change the display resolution, regulate the level of texture detail, and choose one of four post-processing modes (default, muted, vivid and intense). The latter affect the intensity of the bloom effect and the overall contrast of the image, so the choice depends entirely on your particular preferences. Many people will probably leave this parameter at its default.

When you select the maximum level of detail, 16x anisotropic filtering is enabled automatically if its level is not fixed in the driver. The game doesn’t support FSAA. The developer says FSAA will be available in the full version of the game working in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. This limitation is due to the deferred rendering technique employed by the game engine – deferred lighting, to be exact – which makes it impossible to enable FSAA with DirectX 9.

The game supports voice commands to control the bots, which is very useful in battle conditions as every second you spend to type in a text command may be deadly to your character. Well, this feature will only be useful if the voice recognition system works right, but the idea looks exciting and adds more realism to the game even if you play with PC-controlled opponents.

As we noted in the Ageia PhysX review, the game supports hardware physics accelerators, but an Ageia card wouldn’t improve the gameplay of the demo in comparison with the software version of the physics effect engine. The developer promises support for destructible environments, so the final version of the game may indeed benefit from a standalone physics-processing card.