Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Preview – AMD and NVIDIA Compared

Shangri La is a much more open map than Heat Ray, and is more suited to those who prefer long distance battles to the brutality of a Flak Cannon duel at 1 pace.  Snipers will feel much more at home, as there are several places to hide and draw a bead on your next victim, as long as they haven’t found the Helmet power up.  The centrally placed open arena also offers a popular place to rack up a few kills, as most paths lead you to there, and it never seems to be totally empty. 

The interior areas are fairly open as well, but with the added fun of pillars, allowing you to hide from sight when you hear someone coming, or offering some cover if you didn’t notice them.  They are curved, and flak will bounce in some interesting ways, and the goop gun … (sorry, the Bio-Rifle) is also a very useful weapon if it is used right. 

The Shangri La DM map is much more open and has an expansive landscape outside the walls of the venue.

The two start up shots here (where it says to Press FIRE to start) show the progression of the texture loading after the map FIRST begins.  It happened on all of our testing setups including the 8800 GTX and HD 2600 XT.  User’s that play on the Xbox 360 or have played Bioshock will recognize the effect quite well.

The views throughout the map are indeed very impressive to look at while the rock steps detail is damn good as well using some DX9 texture trickery.