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Unreal Tournament 3
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 23rd November 2007
Getting Physical
Since we’re doing things a little ass-backwards today, I’m going to kick the graphical and technical review part of the review off with something which isn’t really to do with graphics.Yep, PhysX.
Ageia and Epic worked together to build the Ageia PhysX engine into the core of the UE3 engine and UT3 is the game which shows that most clearly by providing hardware acceleration for those with a PhysX card. Granted, that’s a minority of gamers, but UT3 is a massive game and if anything could change the minds of gamers at large then it’d be Unreal.
The Ageia PhysX stuff isn’t immediately part of the game. You can enable the hardware acceleration in the menu and supposedly you’ll get some benefit in terms of performance but honestly we couldn’t tell the difference. In vanilla UT3 the game still has realistic ragdolls and debris.
Bunging a BFGTech Ageia PhysX card in the system, we went to the Ageia site and downloaded the PhysX enabled maps which are supposedly unplayable without an Ageia PhysX card. There were only two available when we reviewed, but Ageia is supposedly working to add more later on.
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The two levels boast all sorts of cool features and the descriptions are practically bursting with buzzwords. Destructible environments, dynamic physics, gravity guns – the whole nine yards. We jumped in to both levels and tried them out.
Reaction: Immediate disappointment. On the standard gaming rig we use – housing an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, a GeForce 8800 Ultra and 2GB of RAM whilst running Vista – the framerate fell through the floor. What had previously averaged at a smooth 30-35 FPS with everything on maximum now suffered 4-7FPS even with everything on minimum.
The look of the game was pretty much ruined too. While it’s true that the walls and floors in the Lighthouse map are often destructible, there’s no distinction between breakable and unbreakable materials. Even if you do shoot a plank or a window then there’s no way to be sure you’ll get a realistic reaction.
There’s one section of the level for example which has a whole load of planks on the floor. Firing three rockets into the planks would often only damage the single plank directly hit, not the planks all around it. Even if you did hit the plank then the debris which came out was always odd looking. It was all small bits, oddly coloured to be slightly lighter than the surroundings and there was always far, far too many of them.
Every time we shot a breakable surface the whole thing splintered into a billion bits and, because of the appalling framerate, the interactions were always off. It was possible to shoot a wooden plank, watch it splinter, run away and get beneath the debris before the first piece even hit the floor.
Click to enlarge
Some parts of the screenshots here may look good and give the impression the PhysX effects are A Good Thing. Going by our impressions, we’d have to say that that isn’t true.
We moved over onto the other PhysX level, the massively hyped one which has a tornado in it. The results were the same and the framerate still made the game unplayable even without any bots playing. It was possible to see the potential strength of the PhysX system here – there was a huge amount of objects swirling around in the tornado and being thrown around. Watching the tornado rip off a load of metal panels from a building was fun too.
However, again some of the interactions were clearly flawed. Shooting the same metal panels with a trio of rockets would barely budge them and shattering panes of glass created shards which looked very odd.
The more pressing problem with the Tornado level however, apart from the spoilt framerate, was the poor level design and graphics. Because there was a swirling tornado in the middle of the level, it was easy to see the smoke from it clipping through walls and objects. The level just didn’t feel fun to play either and we were left with the impression that the PhysX system had been forced into the second level without a clear understanding of how to properly integrate physics into gameplay.
The final thing to mention is the new weapon that the levels add – a gravity gun type of weapon which screams of Half-Life 2 wannabe and looks almost identical to the Shock Rifle. It was interesting to kind of play around with and to mix debris up with, but as a weapon I tended to prefer the more reliable and proven arsenal. Physics can let you down, but a minigun will always see you right.
Update - 21st Dec 2007
We've since spoken to Ageia, who have informed us that there may be a problem with our hardware configuration which results in the low FPS we encountered. You can read our thoughts about it here, or Ageia's response here. We are currently investigating the matter further.
Update - 18th Jan 2008
We have recently discovered that faulty hardware may have caused unreliable performance in the PhysX review of Unreal Tournament 3. As such, we later revisited the game with working hardware, the results of which you can read here
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