Rendering Technology:
Unreal Tournament 3 makes thorough use of HDR, rendering and compositing all scenes to a 16-bit-per-component floating point frame buffer. It supports an orthogonal combination of pre-computed static lighting with dynamic lighting, featuring antialiased soft shadows generated via oversampled shadow buffers. All materials are lit with a normal-mapped parameterized Phong lighting model and are 100% artist-extensible, enabling an unlimited combination of material effects such as anisotropic lighting, HDR glows, parallax mapping, and volumetric effects. After rendering, the HDR scene is augmented with an advanced series of cinematically-inspired post processing effects, including glows, distortion, depth of field, fades, and film grain.

The game makes extensive use of particle systems to simulate explosions, weapon effects, lighting, smoke, electric arcs, and environment effects. The underlying particle technology is artist-driven, and enables combining a vast set of effects including parametric motion, volumetric glows, and z-buffer based volumetric effects.

The engine is multithreading, with rendering and gameplay delegated to separate threads. Thus even in the most detailed scenes under heavy gameplay conditions, the game is seldom CPU-bottlenecked, with frame rate accurately reflecting the underlying GPU performance. This is especially vital in a fast-action shooter, which hardcore gamers expect to run at a consistent 60 frames per second!


Physics & Character Technology:
The underlying rigid body dynamics system provides the basis for Unreal Tournament 3’s extensive use of vehicles, including drivable vehicles with independent suspensions, complex alien walking vehicles, and flying vehicles.

The game’s characters make used of a physically-based animation model, enabling motion-captured human animation to integrate seamlessly with physics-driven character movement so, for example, a character can realistically transition from walking to physically falling and tumbling as a result of being shot, and then stand up again realistically under animation control. UT3 characters are extremely detailed, and comprise models with tens of thousands of triangles, detailed with several texture maps and normal maps. The characters are constructed from source meshes – created by Epic artists – comprising 2 to 8 million triangles; the geometry detail is then analyzed and converted down to normal maps, preserving the lighting appearance of the original model when rendered in-game.