Still As Life

Well, I just had my first go of Unreal Tournament 3. Let's just say, I am quite the disappointed, in my computer. You may recognize the screen shot to the left as being from Duke Nukem 3D from over a decade ago.

Well, this is better quality than what my computer will run Unreal Tournament 3 at. I tried to get a screen shot of it, but my computer is in one of those "I don't feel like taking a screen shot" kind of mood's at the moment, so I guess I will get one later, if I can be bothered trying to play it again. I suppose I should, even if it is just to get a screen shot of the amazing failure of my system.

For anyone that doesn't know, my computer is as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+
• 1gb of 400mhz DDR RAM
• ATI Radeon x800 GTO 256mb/256bit (PCI-E)
  
• And the rest is mostly irrelevant.

Now the minimum requirements to run it on Windows are:

• Windows XP/Vista
• 2.0+ GHz Single Core Processor
• 512 MB of System RAM
• NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

So logically, I should be fine. Logically, my old computer should also have been fine.

However, when I open it up, it tells me that my computer doesn't even meet the minimum requirements.

Odd.

A friend of mine has an almost identical setup to mine and he could play it at higher quality settings than I can.

I think I shall have to have a bit more of a tweak and play around with my background processes and game settings.

Alternatively, I could just upgrade sooner.

For anyone interested, the recommended system requirements for Unreal Tournament 3 are:

• 2.4GHz Dual-Core Processor
• 1GB of RAM
• NVIDIA 7800GTX OR ATI x1300 GFX-card
• 8 GB of free HDD space

Yeah, my rig completely fails there.

Unreal Tournament 3 is going to be available for OS X (Yay), however, to my knowledge, it isn't out yet, please correct me if I'm wrong as I would love to get my hands on it and try it out on my Macbook Pro as I expect it will have a much better chance at doing it justice than my current desktop.

Previously, with most game sequels, take for example Unreal Tournament's 2003 and 2004, you could play 2003 at say medium quality on a computer and then the same computer would only run 2004 at low quality, this is logical right, but low quality on 2004 would be similar to medium quality on 2003. I don't remember exactly how close they are as I haven't played 2003 in some time now, this is just an example. Yet with Unreal Tournament 3, the settings I'm running it on, which I might add, are not the lowest, it is still poorer quality than a game that is over a decade old, and much poorer than it's predecessors.

This really amazes me, and yet, it doesn't surprise me all that much. In the 3-4 years since Unreal Tournament 2004, there have been some major increases in performance in virtually everything.

• Increased processing power as well as dual and quad core CPU's
• Faster and increased quantities of RAM
• Higher powered graphics processors
• Lets not forget, dedicated physics processors.

Unreal Tournament 3 does not require a dedicated physics processor, but similarly to many of the latest games, it incorporates a great deal of physics calculations that its predecessor did not.

I'm looking forward to playing this game on a new computer so I can see first hand the difference that these jumps forward have made in the Unreal Engine 3, rather than just watching video clips and trailers and drooling.

And here is a trailer, just in case you haven't already seen it:

Labels: games, software, video clips