HANDS ON GUIDE

03 - Unreal Tournament 3

Ageia, the creators of PhysX, released some PhysX-enabled maps for Unreal Tournament 3. Now that PhysX runs in Nvidia’s CUDA GPGPU language, we had to use the Nvidia PhysX UT3 Mod Pack to update the PhysX levels. Three levels are installed or modified, and the extra effects include:

Hail
Destructible scaffolding
Destructible wall pieces with rock debris, cover and electronic displays
New Gravity Wave Cannon
Exploding barrels that destroy nearby destructible objects

The hail effect in the HearRay level looks terrible however, little more than a collection of white circles that only bounce off certain objects, not including canisters or players and mostly just the floor of the level. In all, we'd rather not have the hail.

The destructible scenery and debris also suffers from the old PhysX problem of disappearing after a few seconds. Shoot some glass and the shards fall to the floor and vanish.

The destructible walls in the Lighthouse level are a bit more fun, though only appear in certain areas of certain levels. Launch a few rockets at the destructible walls and you see them collapse into rubble and smoke, and then you can run through to attack an opponent from what they thought was a safe location.

Some floor sections are also destructible, allowing you to blast through and drop in on opponents unexpected.

Like old cartoons, where the sections that were animated were a different colour to the static portions of the image, the destructible scenery is usually slightly off-colour. We found ourselves looking for the tell-tale signs of destrictible scenery everywhere we ran, just so we could launch something at and grin as it all fell apart. However, this didn't do our kills-to-deaths ratio any good.

We also found the Tornado Ground Zero level quite entertaining. The tornado moves around the level, sucking up debris, barrels and other objects, and scattering them around the game area. Unfortunately, that's all it did. While the tornado might deal damage if you get too near, it's really only visual treat.

Although the physics effects in Unreal Tournament are fun and add a slightly different element to how you play, they only apply to three maps, and even then the advantages of PhysX aren't evenly applied. The Lighthouse level has plenty of destructible walls and floors to enjoy, but the Tornado Ground Zero level only has the PhysX tornado, while the disappearing destructive scenery adding to HeatRay fails to impress.

Our other test games all scale the level of physical effects when using or not using a GeForce graphics card to accelerate PhysX. However, Unreal Tournament 3 runs all the PhysX effects on the CPU if you disable hardware PhysX acceleration, so we took the opportunity to run a few benchmarks.

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