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.





The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic is typically a few frames faster than the standard card—not really enough to make a massive difference to the gameplay experience when both the standard and pre-overclocked cards deliver adequate frame rates at resolutions up to (and including) 1920x1200. Compared to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT, the card is again slower than the equivalent from Nvidia, but that doesn’t really come into play until you get up to 2560x1600. Up until that point, you will get playable frame rates on both the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800 GT cards.