ATI Radeon HD 4890 vs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

The Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack: Finally, a Major Title

Unreal Tournament 3. Metacritic gives it an 83 for “Generally favorable reviews” and NVIDIA released a PhysX mod pack for it last year. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The mod pack consists of three levels that use GPU accelerated PhysX. The rest of the game is left unchanged. You can run these levels without GPU acceleration, but they’re much slower.

The three levels are HeatRay, Lighthouse and Tornado. Guess what the PhysX does in Tornado?

Ben and I played HeatRay together (aw, cute). First the PhysX enabled level with GPU acceleration turned off, then with it turned on and then the standard level that doesn’t use any GPU accelerated PhysX at all.

Turning the PhysX acceleration on made a huge difference, we both agreed. The game was much faster, much more playable. The most noticeable PhysX effect was hail falling from the sky, and lots of it. You could blow up signs in the level but the hail was by far the most noticeable part. Note that I said noticeable, not desirable.

See all of the white pellets? Yeah, that's what PhysX got us in UT3.

Playing the normal version of the HeatRay map was far more fun for both of us. The hail was distracting. Each of the hundreds of pellets hit the ground and bounced off in a physically accurate manner, but in doing so it sounded like I was running through a tunnel full of bead curtains suspended from the ceiling. Not to mention the visual distraction of tons of pellets hitting the ground all of the time. Ben and I both liked the level without the hail. The point of the hail? Not to make the level cooler, but rather to truly stress the PPU/GPU - particles are one of the most difficult things to do on the CPU thanks but work very well on the GPU. This wasn’t a fun level, this was a benchmark.

Tornado was the turning point for us. As the name implies, there’s a giant tornado flying through this capture the flag level. The tornado is physically accurate, if you shoot rockets at it, they fly around and get sucked into the funnel or redirected depending on their angle of incidence. It’s neat.

The tornado sucks up everything around it but if you’re looking to relive Wizard of Oz fantasies I’ve got bad news: you are immune from its sucking power. You just stay on the ground and lose health. Great.

Ben’s take on the tornado level? “It was neat”. I agreed. Not compelling enough for me to tattoo PhysX on my roided up mousing-arm, but the most impressive thing we’d seen thus far.