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.





The performance gap between the Radeon HD 3870 and PowerColor’s factory-overclocked Radeon HD 3850 is around eight percent on average across the three resolutions tested here. At lower resolutions, the former is less than five percent slower then Nvidia’s standard-clocked GeForce 9600 GT, but as resolution increases, that gap increases to over 15 percent. Meanwhile, the 8800 GT stands at around 14 percent faster than the 9600 GT across the board.