The Unreal Tournament 3 demo snuck onto the net early this morning. We quickly downloaded and installed the game to check out Epic's latest Unreal Engine 3 showcase.

The demo includes three maps, as well as four game types: deathmatch, team deathmatch, vehicle capture-the-flag, and duel mode. The deathmatch and dueling modes offer two maps. There is the neon-lit Heat Ray urban battleground map and Shangri La, an Asian-themed courtyard map. The vehicle capture-the-flag games all take place on a large suspension bridge called, you guessed it, Suspense.

Think Gears of War, but bigger, faster, and without any huggable cover.

The demo doesn't offer a whole lot of video settings, but we did find World Detail, Texture Detail, and Post Processing effects options while exploring the settings menu. We took all of our screenshots on Heat Ray and Shangri La.

We found that the World Detail option did a little more than "change the detail of world geometry in-game" as the menu tooltip suggests. Shifting the setting from 1 to 2 changed the lighting and added a soft blur effect in our Shangri La test. Extra geometry started appearing on windows and other surfaces at level 3. We also noticed that our weapon gained self-shadowing when we moved up to level 4.

World Detail Settings


The Texture Detail setting did indeed increase texture resolutions as we moved the slider up from 1 to 3, but then we noticed that textures remained the same at levels 3, 4, and 5 from our spawn point in Heat Ray.

Texture Detail Settings

Finally, we also scaled up the two settings together to see how the graphics improve as both settings increase.

World and Texture Detail Settings

We hoped that the Post Processing pull-down menu would let us adjust the shader quality or DirectX version support, but the muted, default, vivid, and intense options suggested otherwise. We found that cycling through the Post Processing options only changed the map's light intensity.

Post Processing Settings


It's too early to run official benchmarks because the game is only in beta, but we wanted to run a few numbers to show how cards are performing. We'll do a full hardware performance guide when the game is officially released.

Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Performance

(Longer bars indicate better performance)
1600x1200, Maximum Quality
GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
100
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
86
Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
84
Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
47
Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
35
GeForce 7900 GS 256MB
21

System Setup: Intel Core 2 X6800, Intel 975XBX2, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GBx2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Cards: GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB, GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB XXX, GeForce 7900 GS 256MB, Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB, Radeon X1900 XT 256MB. Graphics Drivers: Nvidia ForceWare 163.75,Catalyst 7.10