Epic on UT3 Performance

I know this is old, but it’s still interesting for those looking forward to Unreal Tournament 3, the upcoming entry in Epic’s shooter series. PC Games Hardware, a German gaming magazine, sat down with Tim Sweeney, who talked about the game’s performance on hardware as well as software support. Here’s a bit:

PCGH: Can player speed up performance remarkably by buying a second card for a SLI- or Crossfire system? Have you already measured/experienced differences between those two systems?Tim Sweeney: We test on SLI configurations on a regular basis. There impact at higher resolutions is significant so if you want to experience the full beauty at high resolutions this is a great way to preserve performance while doing so. We haven’t had a chance to run on Crossfire yet, but would expect similar results.
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PCGH: Are there any plans at Epic to upgrade the engine for DX 10? Have you already made experience with Microsoft’s new API?

Tim Sweeney: Yes, we’ll ship Unreal Tournament 3 with full DirectX 10 support. Support for multisampling is the most visible benefit. We’re also able to use video memory more efficiently on Windows Vista under DirectX 10, enabling a given machine to use higher-detail texture settings than are possible in Windows Vista under DirectX 9. Most of Unreal Engine 3’s effects are bound by fill-rate rather than by higher-level features like hardware geometry processing, so the real impact of DirectX 10 is incrementally better performance rather than entirely new features.
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PCGH: It is well known that your engine supports multi core CPUs. What is the maximum number of threads the engine can calculate? What is the performance gain when you play UT 3 with a quad core CPU? Will the engine even support future CPU with more than four cores?

Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3’s threading support is quite scalable. We run a primary thread for gameplay, and a secondary thread for rendering. On machines with more than two cores, we run additional threads to accelerate various computing tasks, including physics and data decompression. There are clear performance benefits to quad-core, and though we haven’t looked beyond that yet, I expect further gains beyond quad-core in future games within the lifetime of Unreal Engine 3.

Unreal Tournament 3 is set for release late this year on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.