Graphics

Now all the PhysX shenanigans are out of the way, we can take a look at the graphics proper and see just what kind of look people can expect to get out of the game.

It’s worth mentioning before we go any further though that there’s a DirectX 10 patch for the game in the works, or so says Mark Rein. It’s also possible to use anti-aliasing in the game if you have an Nvidia card and the latest drivers to go with it. It’s not something which sounds fantastic, but because of the way the engine works it’s impossible to turn on AA otherwise. We're hoping that AMD follows suit and adds anti-aliasing support for this game into its drivers if it is at all possible on its hardware.

UT3 surprised me here. I was expecting to open the video settings and find pages and pages of settings to tweak with and take screenshots of. I didn’t. Instead, the only graphics settings that did exist, other than brightness and resolution, were post-processing, world detail and texture detail.

The last two were to be found in a special advanced tab, which didn’t actually contain a whole lot else other than those two options. Below, we’ve got a breakdown of each of these three settings and a description of their overall effects.

Post-Processing

The post-processing setting is something covers a whole range of different effects rather than a single thing. By definition, it just means all the various changes which are made to a scene after it has already been rendered – the application of various filters


The most obvious change which post-processing is making in the game here is changing the lighting and pixel colour to add HDR and bloom effects. The result is that the levels look brighter, more intense and vibrant.

It also means that the setting is really a matter of taste, assuming you’ve got good hardware. Not everyone is going to like the over-exposed kind of feel that the Intense setting has and may want to scale down to Vivid or Default. It’s all up to you – so don’t ask us to help you out!

Texture Detail

Texture detail is one of the most important settings in most games, because textures are everywhere and cover all surfaces they can have an overpowering effect on the overall look of the game. The setting can be broken down into five settings which are simply labelled 1-5. The higher the number, the better the look, but the changes are often subtle so we’ve got shots of number 5, 3 and 1.


The difference between setting 1 and 3, or 1 and 5 is pretty obvious. The difference between 3 and 5 meanwhile is more subtle and you may have to enlarge the pictures to see it better – it tends to have a more obvious effect on distant textures.

Either way, the texture detail setting has an obvious impact on the overall look of the game. On the higher settings we can see bump mapping and detailed textures edging in, but on the lowest setting we’ve lost both of those. They’ve been replaced with blur that’s so bad even Quake picks on it. That’s fine though – the lowest setting is clearly only intended for the really low end hardware and the fact that those PCs can run the game at all is good.

World Detail

World detail is a setting I’m not that sure about. The name is just far too ambiguous and could possibly overlap with the realms of texture detail. The only way to be sure what it governs and what effect it has is to take screenshots.

The setting breaks down the same as the texture detail setting, so we treated it the same.


The world detail setting does seem to overlap a little bit with the post-processing setting and has similar effects – such as the difference in lighting. It’s also worth looking at the buildings in the distance, which are far outside of the level. It’s possible to pick up the differences in the appearance of the buildings.

If I had to predict what difference the world detail setting would have then I would have said it would have added in extra parts of clutter to the level – antennas on roofs, craters on distant asteroids. That doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’d say this setting is only really worth fiddling with if you’re having a few performance problems. In games like UT3, the one with the highest framerate always wins.