[{DvT}JonahHex]

PCGH: How important will main memory be for the overall performance? How much memory would you recommend?

Tim Sweeney: We require at least 512MB, and you'll want at least 2 gigabytes for optimal performance and detail. Unreal Engine 3 is very scalable in terms of memory usage, so it runs well on low-memory machines at the low texture-detail setting.

PCGH: Can you at this point of development tell our readers what kind of hardware will be required to play the game with all detail in 1024x768 (No FSAA/AF) and 1.600x1.200 (with 4xFSAA - if available - and 8:1 AF)? Will there be any fallback modes for gamers with older hardware like Shader 2.0 cards?

Tim Sweeney: Optimization is still ongoing, so these numbers change on a daily basis. In general, our Unreal Engine 3 games run quite well on DirectX9 class hardware that NVidia and ATI released in 2006 and later, and amazingly well on the high-end cards including DirectX 10 cards. We also support Shader Model 2.0 hardware with minimal visual difference.

Tim Sweeney: Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the $10-20M range. You need to run on ordinary mass-market PCs as well. In reading PC gaming websites, one might get the impression that everyone owns a dual-core PC with a pair of $600 GPUs in SLI configuration, but the reality is very different. More than 80% of PCs sold today are still single-core, and have very low-end DirectX9 graphics capabilities. Unreal Engine 3 supports those configurations well.

I hope I'm not reading into this what I want to read, rather than what is there, but it sounds like UT3 should run decently on a 2+GHz Pentium with 2GB of RAM and the nVidia 7600/7800GS AGP vid cards w/ 256MB or 512MB of vid memory. IOW a decent UT2004 machine upgraded with additional memory and a new vid card should be acceptable even if it is not optimal. After reading this, I expect UT3 run great on my new system so I'm not concerned about that. I'm thinking of those who don't want to do a major mobo/cpu/gpu/ram upgrade.