Mark Rein on Unreal Tournament 3: optimized, not compromised, for each platform

It’s not that because a game is coming out on three platforms – the PS3, Xbox 360, and the PC in this case – a game would be compromised to the lowest common denominator, or that the other versions can’t keep up. Rather, as Mark Rein tells GamePro, Epic Games is committed to making sure that each of the versions of Unreal Tournament 3 is optimized for each platform it will appear on.

So it doesn’t matter if a PC can hold 2GB of RAM and the PS3 and Xbox 360 has only a smaller amount of memory to play with. Rather, each platform presents its own challenges:

The big difference is you have ‘one.’ There’s one kind of machine for PS3, there’s one kind of machine for Xbox 360. So whatever power there is, you can completely exploit it, and you can customize it for that particular CPU, that particular graphics chip, and that particular bandwidth. So you can dig very deeply into the hardware. Whereas on the PC, you wrote a game that was perfectly 100% optimized only for Nvidia, and only for dual-core, you wouldn’t sell very many copies of that game. Invariably, you have to have a game that can scale a across a large range of hardware.

It is quite the workload for them – Mark did mention that while they would love a platform-simultaneous launch for UT3, but “it’s too early to tell if we can pull that off logistically and in terms of manpower.” Heck, they’d love to get UT3 out in 2007, but Epic wants the game to be as perfect as perfect can be, so Mark offers: “when it’s done.”

Oh, and on the question of doubting development, GamePro’s Vicious Sid “was surprised to see UT3 running as smoothly as it was on the PS3.” Mark replied, “People have this weird misconception that [the game] can’t run as well on the PS3 as it can on other platforms. You just got to give us time to do it.” A clear message to the doubters.

It’s not that because a game is coming out on three platforms – the PS3, Xbox 360, and the PC in this case – a game would be compromised to the lowest common denominator, or that the other versions can’t keep up. Rather, as Mark Rein tells GamePro, Epic Games is committed to making sure that each of the versions of Unreal Tournament 3 is optimized for each platform it will appear on.

So it doesn’t matter if a PC can hold 2GB of RAM and the PS3 and Xbox 360 has only a smaller amount of memory to play with. Rather, each platform presents its own challenges:

The big difference is you have ‘one.’ There’s one kind of machine for PS3, there’s one kind of machine for Xbox 360. So whatever power there is, you can completely exploit it, and you can customize it for that particular CPU, that particular graphics chip, and that particular bandwidth. So you can dig very deeply into the hardware. Whereas on the PC, you wrote a game that was perfectly 100% optimized only for Nvidia, and only for dual-core, you wouldn’t sell very many copies of that game. Invariably, you have to have a game that can scale a across a large range of hardware.

It is quite the workload for them – Mark did mention that while they would love a platform-simultaneous launch for UT3, but “it’s too early to tell if we can pull that off logistically and in terms of manpower.” Heck, they’d love to get UT3 out in 2007, but Epic wants the game to be as perfect as perfect can be, so Mark offers: “when it’s done.”

Oh, and on the question of doubting development, GamePro’s Vicious Sid “was surprised to see UT3 running as smoothly as it was on the PS3.” Mark replied, “People have this weird misconception that [the game] can’t run as well on the PS3 as it can on other platforms. You just got to give us time to do it.” A clear message to the doubters.