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.




For UT3, we tested with anti-aliasing disabled for the time being, even though Nvidia's cards can use a driver workaround to enable anti-aliasing – it's worth taking that into account if this title is a factor in your purchasing decision. That said, with 0xAA, the reference GeForce 9600 GT performs in amongst the group of cards it's competing with, but it doesn't really go a ways to convincingly beating any of them.

Meanwhile, Zotac's card sits at the head of this pack, by a decent margin in some situations and it's not far behind the reference-clocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB.