Game:

Unreal Tournament 2003 (2002)

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!

Along with a new generation of Unreal Engine (UE2) came in late 2002 also a new game, Unreal Tournament 2003 (Epic Games/Digital Extremes, September 2002), the “next-gen” sequel to 1999's Unreal Tournament. Sure, it might not add a whole lot of new content to the UT formula but how did it run on a somewhat typical PC from early-to-mid 2002? That's what this video will attempt to demonstrate.

This footage was grabbed from the unpatched retail CD-ROM release, version 2107.

UT2003 was quite heavy on both the CPU and GPU at the time, what with the higher-density environment geometry, CPU requirements from bots and filtered real-time Shadow Mapping casting from on-screen characters (and so on). This Pentium4 2.4 GHz Northwood system I'm using might have been pretty high-end for mid-2002 standards but you could find samples operating at a few hundred megaHertz faster by the time UT2003 rolled out, not to mention ATi's faster Radeon 9000 series GPUs instead of the GeForce4. That said, these kinds of specifications were likely not uncommon for this game and certainly handles the stress a lot better than a Coppermine CPU (regardless of what GPU it's paired with)!

As the footage shows, the graphical settings are all maxed out, which does add quite a bit of extra demand on the video card and processor. What isn't obvious, however, is that the Hardware 3D Audio + EAX sound drivers also cause noticeable additional stress on performance. By how much? Let's just put it like this: spots in DM-Antalus that run at 100 frames/sec in flyby mode now top out at 80 frames/sec. and the lowest typical framerate in DM-Inferno with 4 bots that is normally in the high 20s is now in the low 20s (etc.). Given the weirdness of Epic's unmodified Unreal Engine 2 positional 3D audio (the left and right channels flipping when you look up or down too much, which also happens in Unreal 2: The Awakening and Postal 2) I wouldn't say that Hardware 3D Audio adds a whole lot to the experience, along with the somewhat unnoticeable or outright absent use of EAX in UT2003 (things improved considerably in its sequel, UT2004).

Thanks to MathEngine’s Karma physics and collision software, UT2003 (along with the Doom 3 E3 2002 prototype) was an early pioneer in the use of “proper” ragdoll physics (i.e. a fully rigid-body simulated interconnection of limbs) that weren’t just a strange approximation of ragdolls like the “springboard physics” dinos in Trespasser (1998) or the particles-for-joints method (see “Verlet integration”) in games like Trasher: Skate And Destroy (1999) or Hitman: Codename 47 (2000). This means that, maybe for the first time, bodies could convincingly roll and rest on their sides, limbs could rest over other limbs and a velocity applied to one point transfered to connected limbs with a proper swing. HL2 fanatics will tell you that the Source Engine revolutionized game physics but it’s not exactly true when you consider the various Unreal Engine 2 — including modified UE2 — games made before it with similar (or better) physics.

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Operating system used: Microsoft Windows XP SP3
Drivers used for GeForce4 Ti4600: nVidia Detonator 30.82 (August 2002)
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Audigy: AUD-WEBUP-W2-US (August 2002, from the file AUDDRVPACK.EXE)

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Intel D850MV motherboard and chipset (board manufactured week 6 2002; has "D850MV/D850EMV2" silk-screened on it)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor; Northwood, 400 MHz FSB (S-spec: SL65R, manufactured week 4 2002 according to heatspreader)
nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 (128 MB) display adapter/graphics card (board manufactured week 7 2002)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy (SB0090) sound card; early variant that has "Creative Audigy" sticker on the EMU10K2 integrated circuit (manufactured around August 2001)
1024 MBs (1 GB) Samsung PC800-45 800 MHz Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) (4x256MB; one pair manufactured week 44 2001, the other week 10 2002)

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 1024x768 capture to 3072x2304 was done using VirtualDub2.

Timestamps!
0:00 - Start-up/Settings
0:19 - DM-Antalus
3:17 - DM-Curse3
5:20 - DM-Inferno
8:16 - DM-Oceanic
10:19 - DM-Phobos2

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