Unreal Tournament 3 performance benchmarked

With such a lengthy time to market, it should come as no surprise that UT3 may not be as jaw-droppingly impressive graphical as we predicted when we saw the tech demos in 2004 and 2005. Based mainly on DX9, the engine has been updated somewhat to include DX10 in SOME areas, but those are still unknown to us as the demo that is set to be released this week is only using DX9 code paths. The fact that the game was originally known as Unreal Tournament 2007, but then renamed to UT3 (signifying the Engine version), is another indicator that perhaps Epic had planned on getting it all wrapped well before this November. After all, do you want a game called "2007" just a month before the year 2008?

It matters not though, as the anticipation for this UT3 demo has created such fervor that the success of the retail release is guaranteed. And for good reason -- the game is fun, the graphics are damn good and it turns out it performs very well on current hardware.