games: Unreal Tournament 3

Unreal Tournament 3, based on Epic's Unreal Engine 3, has been in development for years. BioShock, Gears of War, and Mass Effect also use Unreal Engine 3 yet preceded Unreal Tournament 3's arrival by a few months, and almost a year in the case of Gears of War. The games may all use the same engine, but they have very different hardware requirements. Whereas BioShock requires powerful hardware to run, Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't leave anyone out of the fun. Mid-range CPUs and video cards from two years ago can run the game just fine, and with marvelous image quality. Of course, if you want more performance, higher resolutions, and antialiasing, more power is the way to go.

We tested Unreal Tournament 3 using the UT3Bench utility. The utility uses multiple demos, but we stuck with the Suspense flyby demo for all of our performance tests. The flyby takes a 60-second aerial tour of one of the larger vehicle-based multiplayer maps. All results are the average of three test runs.

Game Settings
Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't have too many settings, but what you do select makes a big difference on how the game performs and looks.

Graphics
The minimum specs for Unreal Tournament 3 call for a GeForce 6800, and it runs surprisingly well with one. We tested the game with more than 20 video cards, and checked to see how performance varied across three different operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista 32-bit, and Windows Vista 64-bit.

CPU
If you've got a CPU made in the past three years, you probably won't have too much trouble running Unreal Tournament 3. We tested out some of the more recent processors on the market to show you what an upgrade might do for you.

Memory
Unreal Tournament 3 requires 512MB of RAM, but you're definitely going to need more than that if you want to run the game at higher image-quality settings. We tested Unreal Tournament 3 with varying amounts of memory across Windows XP, Window Vista 32-bit, and Windows Vista 64-bit.