The guy's over at Beyond Unreal have thrown up their chat with Epic's Tim Sweeney about Unreal Engine 3!
BU: You are talking about dropping detail levels, what about a 3.2 or something similar?
TS: That will kind of be a low end system for our game if you look what's going to happen two years out. The technology is very scalable and will run a factor of twenty more detail on the highest end PCs currently available. It will be like running Unreal Tournament 2004 on a 1 GHz PC. It runs okay, but not nearly as good as a 3.2. BU: UT2004 required 5.5 gigs of hard drive space to install. This has got to be a strain a lot of people's systems. So you're talking 2048 x 2048 texture sets, what kind of system and memory is this next game going to take?
TS: Well, we are aiming at the kind of PC that we think will be mainstream in 2006. We will also be able to scale it down. Basically DirectX 9 cards will be minimum spec, so any DirectX 9 shipping today will be capable of running our game, but probably at reduced detail. If you only have a 256 meg video card you will be running the game one step down, whereas if you have a video card with a gig of memory then you'll be able to see the game at full detail.
Tim Sweeney on Unreal Engine 3
BU: You are talking about dropping detail levels, what about a 3.2 or something similar?
TS: That will kind of be a low end system for our game if you look what's going to happen two years out. The technology is very scalable and will run a factor of twenty more detail on the highest end PCs currently available. It will be like running Unreal Tournament 2004 on a 1 GHz PC. It runs okay, but not nearly as good as a 3.2. BU: UT2004 required 5.5 gigs of hard drive space to install. This has got to be a strain a lot of people's systems. So you're talking 2048 x 2048 texture sets, what kind of system and memory is this next game going to take?
TS: Well, we are aiming at the kind of PC that we think will be mainstream in 2006. We will also be able to scale it down. Basically DirectX 9 cards will be minimum spec, so any DirectX 9 shipping today will be capable of running our game, but probably at reduced detail. If you only have a 256 meg video card you will be running the game one step down, whereas if you have a video card with a gig of memory then you'll be able to see the game at full detail.
Tim Sweeney on Unreal Engine 3
