Why the Unreal Tournament III engine is brilliant

Oct 19, 2007

There's no reason not to grab the just-released Unreal Tournament IIIbeta demoand join in on Epic's classic deathmatch action. What? Worried that the menu screen alone will cause your three-year-old rig to choke and die? Perhaps the likes of Crysis should intimidate decrepit hardware, but the brilliance of the Unreal Tournament III engine is that Epic has intentionally kept the minimum system requirements as low as possible. With the right equipment, it looks better than Half-Life 2, but if spending the entirety of your last five paychecks on a shiny new system isn't an option, it doesn't have to be.

Granted, it may look something like a supercharged DOS game on the lowest settings, but the words "KILLING SPREE!" make us forget all about the giant pixels. The minimum specs, as being posted by retailers, are:

CPU: 2.8Ghz
RAM: 512MB
Graphics: Geforce 6 series

We ran it on a 3 Ghz system with 1.5 GB RAM, and a 256 MB Radeon X600 - it ran smoothly on low settings, and was a little choppy, but still playable on medium settings. Check out the screenshot comparison below to get an idea of what it looks like on low and high-end systems.