Unreal 3 thinks threading

EPIC'S Tim Sweeney rattled on about technology in Unreal Engine 3, which will debut on the PC with Unreal Tournament 2007.

On the graphics front, Sweeney said that the game will run well on anything from Nvidia or ATI produced since 2006, which means X1k and GeForce 7 hardware.

On anything before that, technical limitations will bump you down to lower image quality and lower performance.

If you're lucky enough to be running a DX10 card, expect to see some fancy-pants DX10-stylee multi-sample edge smoothing going on, which promises to look spectacular. The range of 512MB+ cards also means that there are going to be some insanely detailed textures being pushed around.

One of the big questions on the mind of gamers has to be PhysX support, since this is really the first big release to integrate the card's features. There's mixed news: whilst the game magazine describes UE3's physics engine as being 'PhysX' based, Sweeney goes on to say that in multi-core systems, the processor will quite happily take the load of calculating physics.

"There is a primary thread for the gameplay and a second one for rendering. On systems with more than two cores we run additional threads to speed up various calculation tasks, including physics and data decompression. So the overall performance benefits greatly from a quad-core processor."

That's good news for Intel, who will almost certainly be thrusting this onto the unsuspecting public.

And as for a 64-bit version of the game? After all, UT2004 was one of the first games to work with Windows XP x64. "Unfortunately, full software and driver compatibility isn't there," said the man, so it's on the list to do at some point in the future.

Expect to see UT07 on the shelves for Chrimbo. µ