Unreal Tournament 3

Publisher: Midway

Unreal Tournament 3 is the latest addition to the Unreal franchise and it is a clear attempt to replace the previously separate games. Unreal used to be very focused on singleplayer elements, while Unreal Tournament's focus was on the multiplayer side of things.

The game is based on Epic's heavily licensed Unreal Engine 3 technology, which is used by many games that were released last year or are due for release over the next couple of years. The current version of Unreal Tournament 3 only supports DirectX 9.0 but Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, said that DirectX 10 support in UT3 is forthcoming.

The engine uses a Deferred Rendering technique, which basically prevents the game from supporting anti-aliasing techniques in a traditional sense because there are multiple surfaces stored in the MRTs. In fact, Epic decided that there wasn't even a need to include application-controlled anisotropic filtering - instead, we had to force anisotropic filtering from the driver control panel.

Because of the variability in this title, being a multiplayer game, we played five three minute bot matches against 23 bots on the vCTF-Sandstorm map, recording the average frame rate over this period. We then removed the highest and lowest results to remove outliers and the average of the remaining three is the frame rate we are displaying here -- this represents around nine minutes of typical gameplay.

After we completed our testing for this review, it was made known to us that ATI, like Nvidia, has now enabled support for anti-aliasing in this title using a driver workaround. We'll come back to testing anti-aliasing performance in this title at a later date.





UT3 yields mixed results for BFG Tech's GeForce 8800 GTS OC 512MB, as it's faster than Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX at 1920x1200, but slower than it at both 1680x1050 and 2560x1600. What's more, this is a title where the Radeon HD 3870 X2 excels---especially at 2560x1600---and that does take some of the shine off the BFG 8800 GTS OC 512MB's showing in this title.

That said, there is a pretty large price differential between the 8800 GTS 512 and the 3870 X2 and it just so happens that ATI has pretty much nailed the 3870 X2 drivers for this title.