Unreal Tournament 3 Gameplay Performance and IQ @ [H]

I always thought AA was to smooth the edges, in the pictures comparing AA, the better pictures with AA look to have better lighting? That's the only significant difference I can tell from those AA pictures, the ones with AA look to have better lighting, while the other picture with no AA looks to appear darker.
 
RangerSVT said:
I always thought AA was to smooth the edges, in the pictures comparing AA, the better pictures with AA look to have better lighting? That's the only significant difference I can tell from those AA pictures, the ones with AA look to have better lighting, while the other picture with no AA looks to appear darker.
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Uhm...really? I clearly see some smoother edges in the 4x AA screenshots.

When you play at 16x12 though on a fairly small monitor (not 24 inches), you really don't need AA for this game to look good though. There's so much detail around that you never have time to focus on 1-2 diagonal lines like in older games, so it looks great even without AA. Of course without the fps smoothing thing you'd probably get good frame rates even with AA with most new higher-end cards.
 
I'm in the camp of those who are disappointed in the removal of Assault--it's the mode I play the most in UT2004. I guess this will delay my purchase until the modding community has enough time to create lots of good AS maps. I really wonder about the reasoning behind removing it--was it change for change's sake?

The lack of graphics options in the configuration is also disappointing, but I'm very happy to see that a 3850 can play it at 1920x1200 just fine :)
 
Silus said:
Good review, but I have to disagree with what was said about the graphics. UT3 is far from looking good IMO. This actually seems to be a UE3 specific problem, since all the games that use it, suffer from this washed out look. This may look good on consoles, but it definitely doesn't look good on PC. As to the UI, I couldn't agree more. UT is a PC franchise and Epic should've shown more respect for those that supported them and made them what they are today. Instead, they decided to please consoles only. As to what Epic said about "fixing it in a patch", that's hardly a good thing. At least not after the nazi forum moderation that went on the official forums, regarding this issue. Complaints just reached a level, where they couldn't ignore it anymore. That's not good and among the other things I already mentioned, they lost a customer i.e. me.
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"washed out" must be about one of the easiest things to fix by simply tweaking some settings.

Increase: contrast, color, change the gamma, how about "digital vibrance"? It's easy to make such settings auto-apply for just that game too in the Control panel (for either ATI or Nvidia, that's why I didn't specify which).

I thought it looked pretty good, Halo 3 was the big dissapointment of 2007 graphics wise, much worse than UT3 ~ not full HD, no AA...

AA is sorely needed on console games in particular, particularly if you're playing on a large sharp TV at sub-HD resolution!

One thing I'd like to see: a poll by [H] if it's readers to see how many use which resolutions, and to include a test such as: highest image quality at 1600 x 1200, which could easily correlate to 1680 x 1050 for those of us with wide screens. Be nice to know what settings are needed at that res. in order to not dip below 30 FPS, etc.

Decent review, anyway.

Oh, and I have to say, I'm quite impressed with how well UT3 runs, good job on the engine/optimization!
 
AtkinS said:
the 3850 is sent from god by my option, i got a lot of friends, they are freakin poor cause they are so stupid that they dont work, they where still running 9800 pro and p4 2.8 ghz 1 gb ddr memory (4x256 mb rofl) at pc2100, now theyve decided to upgrade, and its very easy with a 3850 to keep the performance very high, and price very low, and the 3850 did seriously show it really good here, however, i think it got more on store for us, but depends if ati driver team can push out abit more of it.

Ati driver team is the bottleneck for ati.
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God yes. The 8800GT is still going for around $260 from reputable sites like Newegg, and right now you can get a Radeon HD 3850 for $180 with a $10 rebate on the Egg. $260 is a bit hard to swallow for me (particularly because I have an overclocked-to-shit Athlon 64 X2 box and not a high-end Core 2 box), but $170 is cheap enough that I might just have an early Christmas.

Now, if only CCC didn't suck so much. Not that NV's control panel is exactly great.
 
It's just that I have a problem with seeing players in UT3. They seem to camoflauge into the background too much because of skin colors being too similar with the wall colors. It's like typing in a dark font color here on the default black background of Hard Forums, making it harder for you to read my words.

Heck, in real life, I can see people better at night time without the street lights on! I've tried tweaking all the graphical settings but on too many maps they just seem to camoflauge.
 
Oh, and about the graphics let-down:

The quality is just horrible compared to the E3 video teasers and screenshots.

Aside from the low gamma/contrast "washed-out" look, there is the over-usage of bloom when trying to emulate HDR post-processing.

Never before have I seen such an exaggeration of bloom! When post-processing is muted, it is like as if Epic tries to punish us for not wanting too much bloom contrast, by giving extremely low-contrast (bland) colors to begin with. I am really really let down by the graphics overall.

I think that Epic chose to go with the gritty, exaggerated bloom/contrast look of Gears of War after seeing how hugely popular it was last year as a #1 seller for Xbox360. Epic probably thought that it should also work for UT3, but no no.. it's a wholly different kind of game. The Quake series were all brown, just like GoW, but definitely not the UT series.

The textures should have had far more vibrant colors to begin with. Fog should be limited to only a few maps, not the majority of it. Player's skins should be designed to contrast against the background, instead of being a dull crimson against a dull bluish-grey background that is all blurred out in fog. A pain in the balls to see...

I'm so sick and tired of crappy implementation of HDR bloom lighting in many games as of late. Bioshock was so much better looking than UT3, even with the same engine--mostly because of the colors used and the post-processing algorithm.

Epic, PLEASE PLEASE try to include a new post-processing option in your next patch that fixes the low contrast/low-gamma problem while not overly-exaggerating bloom and glare off objects, and at the same time greatly brightening players' skins. A good name for this one (like Vivid, Intense, etc..) would be "Realistic". Epic could just as well call this new mode "Unreal" if it sounds more cool.

Our eye retinas already "see" a certain degree of bloom especially if the contrast of our monitors are turned up to the maximum. It gets worse as we get older, or if we have slight cataracts. Plus all CRT monitors (for TV's and PC's) display a considerable degree of bloom at high contrast settings. Ubisoft was careful to not exaggerate bloom in Crysis, and did a wonderful job with HDR lighting (although exaggerated a bit on lighted trees whereas in real life trees do not reflect light in a glaring way).

P.S.-- Epic said that when they found out about Enemy Territory Quake Wars, they scrapped all Assault mode maps in development. I guess they felt that it would lose all popularity to Quake Wars...
 
For those 'disappointed' in the graphics, have you looked at the actual in game shots posted by some of the forum goers that have things properly configured?
A lot of people (on the Epic forums) have not configured their game and it doesn't look right. Usually it is 1 or two options, then it is like 'WOW' once they get it right.

Unfortunately, some of the detection and auto setup parts of it don't make the best initial impression because it gets things 'not quite right'.
 
Bo_Fox said:
P.S.-- Epic said that when they found out about Enemy Territory Quake Wars, they scrapped all Assault mode maps in development. I guess they felt that it would lose all popularity to Quake Wars...
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Do you have a link to that, or was it a joke and I don't get it?
 
wapos said:
For those 'disappointed' in the graphics, have you looked at the actual in game shots posted by some of the forum goers that have things properly configured?
A lot of people (on the Epic forums) have not configured their game and it doesn't look right. Usually it is 1 or two options, then it is like 'WOW' once they get it right.

Unfortunately, some of the detection and auto setup parts of it don't make the best initial impression because it gets things 'not quite right'.
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Yep, plus I have SM3.0 -capable graphics cards. On SM2.0 cards like X800XT, 9800Pro, etc.. UT3 looks absolutely horrible but it's not what we're complaining about. The lighting/contrast is still aggravating.

On some maps, certain settings will look better than on others. What looks best on HeatRay will look worse on ShangriLa, for example. For Heatray, I prefer to use muted or vivid, and on shangrila, I like default. Plus I have tweaked the .ini settings back and forth many times since, completely turning off bloom but with bland graphics that look way worse than the original UT game or UT2004. Epic shouldnt make the colors so that it looks worse than an 8-year old game if bloom is turned off completely.
 
wapos said:
Do you have a link to that, or was it a joke and I don't get it?
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I did read it somewhere a while ago.. tried googling it but cant seem to find it now.

I wouldn't be surprised if Epic tries to mimic Quake Wars by releasing an MMO UT3 game that requires monthly payments.

Personally I cant wait to try out Huxley whenever it's done (was previewed since E3 2005).
 
Perhaps Epic will do another release for UT3 next year like they did with UT2003 and 2004 since 2003 sucked so bad? And most of us think that UT3 sucks just as bad, if not even worse than 2003. Well, aside from complaining, all we can do is wait and see.. I do not think too many people will be modding for UT3 like they did for UT99 and UT2004.
 
Bo_Fox said:
Plus I have tweaked the .ini settings back and forth many times since, completely turning off bloom but with bland graphics that look way worse than the original UT game or UT2004. Epic shouldnt make the colors so that it looks worse than an 8-year old game if bloom is turned off completely.
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I'm sorry but even with the sliders set to 1, UT3 looks years ahead of UT2004. First off, on the lowest settings, its textures are still better than the ones in most DX8 games, not-to-mention it still uses normal mapping, which UT2004 doesn't have. The colors are also more noticible with low settings since all the shadows disappear so everything's usually brighter.

Honestly, just because you would rather have a more colorful game doesn't mean it looks "worse than UT or UT 2004".
 
Big D. said:
I'm sorry but even with the sliders set to 1, UT3 looks years ahead of UT2004. First off, on the lowest settings, its textures are still better than the ones in most DX8 games, not-to-mention it still uses normal mapping, which UT2004 doesn't have. The colors are also more noticible with low settings since all the shadows disappear so everything's usually brighter.

Honestly, just because you would rather have a more colorful game doesn't mean it looks "worse than UT or UT 2004".
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I can refute this - I have compared UT2004 (max settings, no AA/AF) and UT3 on my notebook (GeForce Go 6400, minimum settings) and I can state that UT2004 looks much better. For one thing, UT3 has really crappy textures on the lowest settings. In addition, running the game in 800x480 sucks compared to running UT2004 in 1280x768 (my notebook's native resolution).

Now, once you get some decent hardware behind it, UT3 looks good. But it looks like crap playing on a 64MB, 64-bit, 4-pipe GeForce 6-series card clocked at 300MHz (which is about as slow as it gets for the 6-series).

Hopefully the NVS 140M (GeForce Go 8400) in my new ThinkPad will do better. Not that I bought it for gaming. Well, except for WoW - which I'm sure it will run fine.
 
Well that's just a completely wrong comparisson...I mean you could at least use the same resolution. Anyway, UT3 runs at a constant 60 fps (haven't even tried turning off smoothing or the fps cap) at 1600x1200 with my 8800GT (DM maps) so I'm really impressed by it both visually and in terms of performance on today's video cards.

I remember when I had UT2004 and got my high-end 9800 Pro for about 650 bucks (15% tax included) and I was really happy to run it smoothly at 1024 with max settings - but even that didn't run at 60fps minimum at 1600x1200. UT3's a great achievement I think. I just need to find a way to enable motion blur.
 
Motion Blur is already enabled when you set the world detail to 5. But many say that motion blur is not noticeable anywhere in the game. Or else it would make you harder to see others in a fast-paced shooter mayhem, which is what the game is all about.

Yeah, some maps in UT3 do look great but I am just very let down with the usage of colors and the player graphics. Half Life 2 characters look more realistic and attractive than those in UT3. Graphics is not all about the processing power of polygons (ooohhhh.. that statue has 3,000,000 detailed polygons, therefore it looks better than UT2004)! What I am talking about is the entertainment factor of the graphics. Is it more visually appealing? Heck, it could be cartoon graphics, but if it's all dark colors that are hardly discernible from each other, that cartoon would suck shtick!
 
I personally like Unreal Tournament 3's graphics, exaggerated bloom and all. In this sort of run-and-gun arcadey shooter, the exaggerated bloom only seems to add to the feel of the game. Everything is shiny and glossy, but it fits well with the over-the-top presentation of the rest of the game. Overall, I think the art direction and the Unreal 3 engine gel really well, and the result is really fun to watch. I, too, would like to see a little more noticeable motion blur, but I suppose it would be more of a hindrance than anything.
 
Did they get rid of the stupid vehicles that made the game drastically suck and seem halo knockoffish after the 1st one? 1st UT was by far the best if you ask me.
 
Orayn said:
I personally like Unreal Tournament 3's graphics, exaggerated bloom and all. In this sort of run-and-gun arcadey shooter, the exaggerated bloom only seems to add to the feel of the game. Everything is shiny and glossy, but it fits well with the over-the-top presentation of the rest of the game. Overall, I think the art direction and the Unreal 3 engine gel really well, and the result is really fun to watch. I, too, would like to see a little more noticeable motion blur, but I suppose it would be more of a hindrance than anything.
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Alright, your preference, and I respect that. In fact, many recent "bad-ass" movies use greatly increased contrast lighting for a more gritty feel. That is fine by me, especially considering the dark theme used for those movies.

With Gears of War being released at the same time for PC, I want an UT theme, not GoW dark gritty feel. If I wanted GoW, I'd go and buy GoW instead.

The problem is, the exaggerated contrast just do not work correctly on the brighter maps. The sky is just too bright, with severe glare and reflection off most of the map textures. If I try to mute it, it just looks too washed-out. All you have to do is play the VCTF map, Suspense, and see how plain ugly it is in all of the different settings. Frankly, this map is by far the ugliest map I have ever seen in any UT game! It's so ugly that it hurts my brain's visual cortex! Mind you, I have the full version now.
 
Glow said:
Did they get rid of the stupid vehicles that made the game drastically suck and seem halo knockoffish after the 1st one? 1st UT was by far the best if you ask me.
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Hey, I loved those vehicles. Nearly all of the new modded "LOL" vehicles added to UT2004's onslaught maps are damn awesome! When UT2004 demo first came out, I played on Torlan maybe 1,000 times before the full version finally came out, and never got tired of it. Amazing how those demo servers are still so popular after 3+ years already.
 
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