The Haus

Tuesday, March 28, 2000

Evil Avatar and Tim Sweeney -- 4:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Evil Avatar fired off some questions to Epic's Tim Sweeney. Here's what I found to be the most interesting:
Evil: If Quake III Arena runs so great under OpenGL, how come the Unreal Engine doesn't and what are you going to do about it?

Tim: Quake's OpenGL support is superior to UT's OpenGL support because id Software designed the engine 100% focused on OpenGL. From the very beginning, their level designers were placing textures in their levels, and the programmers were doing their thing, with OpenGL's performance characteristics in mind.
Basically, that's what we've known all along. The Q3A engine was built from the ground up to be an OpenGL engine, the UT engine was built from the ground up to be a Glide engine. Thus the differences. Tim continues,
We support Direct3D, Glide, software rendering, and now PlayStation2 rendering. Supporting multiple API's requires a different set of tradeoffs. This is bad for OpenGL performance, but good for other things. For example, Unreal Tournament is fun and playable on those $400 to $500 PC's that are so popular in retail stores and are bringing computers to ordinary people, as opposed to hardcore gamers. Most of these computers can't run Quake 3 because they lack adequate 3D acceleration. But they have fast CPU's, so Unreal Tournament's software renderer saves the day.
Quite interesting, but I challenge you to find a $400-$500 PC that will run UT decently. Especially without at least a Voodoo2.

News for 03/28/2000

Recent Headlines

January 5, 2015: It Returns!
August 10, 2007: SCO SUCKS IT DOWN!
July 5, 2007: Slackware 12.0 Released
May 20, 2007: PhpBB 3.0 RC 1 Released
February 2, 2007: DOOM3 1.31 Patch

January 27, 2007: Join the World Community Grid
January 17, 2007: Flash Player 9 for Linux
December 30, 2006: Darkness over Daggerford 1.2
December 19, 2006: Pocket Tunes 4.0 Released
December 9, 2006: WRT54G 1.01.1 Firmware OK with Linux/Mac

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).