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Sadly, my mac mini will probably not be enough to run it. I'll have to stick with UT2K4.

I expect the system requirements to be pretty darn high.

NightCougar_37 wrote:

Still, very nice of Epic to enable PPCs to run this.

They said "Mac native code" meaning no Cider port, but they didn't say yes to "PPC support" outright.
Reading in farther, it looks like they may not bother compiling a Universal binary if they find that too few PPC machines have the video card muscle to squeak past minimum specs.

Plenty of PPC G5s out there that could run it. They even had a better assortment of GPUs than the current models have.

Make sure Brad Oliver is bugged to get all the neaty-keeno OpenGL tricksies and extensions into Apple's OGL implementation. We don't want a slipshod port lacking graphical goodness... akb25?

Ok, I'm obviously no expert when it comes to graphics cards.  I don't play games on my Mac very often.  I'm generally more of a console gamer.  But I've never enjoyed FPS games on consoles, so I'd rather play this on my Mac.

So here comes the "obviously no expert" question.  Will my 2.4 GHz C2D iMac with the Radeon HD2600 and 3GB of RAM run this game?

And, on a side note, how does one judge how "good" a graphics card is?  I know it's way more than memory, but when I see requirements that say, "Card X or better," how do I know what's better than card X?

Cynic wrote:

Ok, I'm obviously no expert when it comes to graphics cards.  I don't play games on my Mac very often.  I'm generally more of a console gamer.  But I've never enjoyed FPS games on consoles, so I'd rather play this on my Mac.

So here comes the "obviously no expert" question.  Will my 2.4 GHz C2D iMac with the Radeon HD2600 and 3GB of RAM run this game?

And, on a side note, how does one judge how "good" a graphics card is?  I know it's way more than memory, but when I see requirements that say, "Card X or better," how do I know what's better than card X?

It'll run ok, but it won't look as pretty as an XBOX or a PS3.  If you have a PS3, I'd recommend using it with a keyboard and mouse (assuming you have an HD set).  If you have a 360, then the iMac wins by default.

To answer your first question, this guide is a good overall picture of how today's cards stack up against one another.  In some cases, two cards are so close that their relative placement in the list is open to debate.  The opposite is also true -- that is, for two adjacent cards in the list, there might be a gargantuan performance difference.

Last edited by Mr. T (2007-12-20 4:44 pm)

Oh what's a real pisser is when the card you have is powerful enough save the fact that it doesn't support the game required shader or T&L version yet when someone who has the right card loads the game can disable those settings for a performance boost but at the expense of display quality.

ScifiterX wrote:

Oh what's a real pisser is when the card you have is powerful enough save the fact that it doesn't support the game required shader or T&L version yet when someone who has the right card loads the game can disable those settings for a performance boost but at the expense of display quality.

That doesn't make any sense... if our arbitrary game X has support for PS2.0 and PS3.0, that's not going to stop PS2.0 cards from working.

Sometimes better is arbitrary in sense that you can have superior hardware, shader support, T&L support, and DX support but have an inferior OpenGL support. If a superior OpenGL superior was need than you are SOL despite having a "better" card.

A safe bet of getting pretty good performance from a GPU is looking at the memory bus. If its got 256bit or better, you're set. If its 128bit, you're in midrange land and will probably need to trim a few effects. If its 64bit, you're the laughing stock of gamers everywhere.

Exceptions to these rules however have been the 6600GT and 7600GTs in the 128bit area. Performance on those 2 were just so good that they were pricewise better buys than the low lvl 256bit boards at the time. Generally tho, if you're gonna game and want more than a year out of your board before it lags bad, go 256bit.

Booksley wrote:

The only truly safe bet when getting a GPU...

is to dump $600 on it. You get what you pay for. j/k!

Honestly you're all wrong...well more like half right. Not to say GPU isn't important but AnandTech found out how important CPU cache is too.

To see how dependent Unreal Engine 3 and the UT3 demo are on low latency memory accesses we ran 4MB, 2MB and 1MB L2 Core 2 processors at 1.8GHz to compare performance scaling.

From 1MB to 2MB there's a pretty hefty 12 - 13% increase in performance at 1.8GHz, but the difference from 2MB to 4MB is slightly more muted at 4 - 8.5%. An overall 20% increase in performance simply due to L2 cache size on Intel CPUs at 1.8GHz is impressive. We note the clock speed simply because the gap will only widen at higher clock speeds; faster CPUs are more data hungry and thus need larger caches to keep their execution units adequately fed.

Link thanks to Bat. Posted in the Demo thread (My Bold.)

Booksley wrote:

That doesn't make any sense... if our arbitrary game X has support for PS2.0 and PS3.0, that's not going to stop PS2.0 cards from working.

Sci is kinda correct. If you visit the UT3 tech/trouble forums there's a lot of 78-79XXGT* owners out there who for some reason can't run the game. Even tho they meet or beat the reqs. Some of the problems point to PS2 and/or DX9 issues.

I know I'm one of them. For what ever reason UT3 shuts my machine off. Playing fine and then POOF! Instant off. It's been that way with demo and retail. I thought I had the problem licked. Made it through all of the single player w/o issues. Next day got online and into my third match...poof!. That was the last poof my XP install could handle. When I turned the machine back on check disk found tons of corrupt files. The PC never ran right after that. I'm on a new install and ready to take baby steps to see what is killing it. SLI, drivers, audio, other software...the list is long.

macmenace wrote:

Yesterday 9:22 pm I ran the UT3 Demo on Vista on pretty much max settings (except only about 2x AA) at 1680 x 1050 on my Mac Pro and it ran at about 35 fps. But, the engine seems very versatile so I would guess you could find a setting appropriate for any recent Mac. (minus the Minis and Macbooks)

Very true the Unreal Engine has always scaled very well.

To add to the performance picture. I have a Asus Deluxe SLI32, Athy64 4800+, 2Gb ram, a pair of 7800GTXs in SLI and XPSP2. When UT3 runs I've been playing at 1280X1024 with everything maxed and get a fairly solid 50FPS. Now in XP you don't get FSAA natively. That only comes with DX10 and Vista. However there is an app/hack you can download to force AA in DX9. I haven't used it because of my issues. The silver lining is that even at 800X600 and details set to 1 (lowest) the game still looks very good.

Last edited by LLEVIATHANN (2007-12-21 10:44 am)

LLEVIATHANN wrote:

Booksley wrote:

The only truly safe bet when getting a GPU...

is to dump $600 on it. You get what you pay for. j/k!

See! You understand! I figure it's something like $60/letter... marketing is expensive nowadays, you see.

LLEVIATHANN wrote:

Booksley wrote:

That doesn't make any sense... if our arbitrary game X has support for PS2.0 and PS3.0, that's not going to stop PS2.0 cards from working.

Sci is kinda correct. If you visit the UT3 tech/trouble forums there's a lot of 78-79XXGT* owners out there who for some reason can't run the game. Even tho they meet or beat the reqs. Some of the problems point to PS2 and/or DX9 issues.

I know I'm one of them. For what ever reason UT3 shuts my machine off. Playing fine and then POOF! Instant off. It's been that way with demo and retail. I thought I had the problem licked. Made it through all of the single player w/o issues. Next day got online and into my third match...poof!. That was the last poof my XP install could handle. When I turned the machine back on check disk found tons of corrupt files. The PC never ran right after that. I'm on a new install and ready to take baby steps to see what is killing it. SLI, drivers, audio, other software...the list is long.

Well, that's a load of crap. Good thing I'm offloading my 7900GT to my brother, and installing a HD3870 (just arrived today! ) into my compy386.