Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Preview – AMD and NVIDIA Compared

You start off the map peering through the darkness at a neon sign glowing on the rubble that chokes the streets of a ruined city block.  Standing still in this map is not a good idea, even though there are many tempting sniper positions in the halls of a decaying building that dominates the center of the map.  It is quite dark, and there are many tight spaces in which you can get up to a lot of mischief, or suffer a gruesome fate as a bot whips around a corner you thought was safe. 

There are a few stretches of open space at street level, for those that want a bit of distance between themselves and their prey, and a bridge to closed building doors where a lot of gamers will send most of their time.  It is the spawn of the Dark Walker, a vehicle similar to the Striders in HL2, but with some serious beam weaponry, the pilot’s long lasting but slow to maneuver paired beam weapon, and a secondary turret that fires pulses and moves significantly faster than the drivers main cannon.  If you can get in it first, you will have to work hard at not hitting Rampage before the vehicle gets shot out from beneath you.

(Thanks goes to our man Jeremy Hellstrom for the map descriptions!)

You can see that the Heat Ray DM map is of the darker type and more typical of shooters like UT3.  The graphics are still very impressive; you can see the Dark Walker in the first screen shot on the right column.

UT fans will surely recognize the chaingun and shock canon in the above shots.

The shot on the right here is of the Dark Walker again and the last one is the effect on the screen when you are hit — a nice red-out effect.