Interview with Tim Sweeney from E3

[jakup]

I eventually want to get a transcript My friend tried to edit out the noise... I dunno if he was successful or not.. heh. I wish I had a mic there.

Unfortunately Tim was very limited on time. Not to mention I got lucky in finding him, since I had sent him an email before I left, but for the first 2 days I could not find him. Nobody knew where he was.. hehe

[Vive_le_Quebec]

Originally posted by jakup
My name is Jacob Freeman. I conducted that interview with Tim Sweeney on Friday.

Could you please clarify what was said about the ability of a $500 system to run the game? Did Tim mean you could run UT2007 with a GeForce Ti4200? If that card isn't compatible with pixel shader 3 (not sure what that is), could you still play the game with it?

[jakup]

Bascially he said that as of now, they do not plan on supporting Geforce4's, or ATI 8500's. He said they may add it very late in the project, but no plans as of yet. He did say it will work with PS2.0, so ATI 9800 and geforceFX cards should work fine.

[placebo]

Originally posted by DaniFilth
You make too many assumptions.

It won't have a shield function, but it will have some kind of secondary function that, ah, [b]and we're still trying to figure that out[b], whether it's a deflection kind of thing like we had in the original UT, or we've had some other ideas that haven't been finalized.

...

If things turn out [with conquest] the way Epic described to us (the mode only exists on paper right now

Although Conquest now has at least one playable map, I think it suffices to say that UT2k7 isn't close to finished, or even pinned down. They're still experimenting with the weapons, the vehicles... and Conquest is a huge undertaking that will no doubt change a lot from now to release.

[placebo]

Originally posted by jakup
I eventually want to get a transcript My friend tried to edit out the noise... I dunno if he was successful or not.. heh. I wish I had a mic there.

Unfortunately Tim was very limited on time. Not to mention I got lucky in finding him, since I had sent him an email before I left, but for the first 2 days I could not find him. Nobody knew where he was.. hehe

I congratulate on your ability to be in the presence of an Epic employee without ejaculating/drooling. It's good that you had a set of very pointed and worthwhile questions to ask. I would have loved to know about Mac/Linux support though. I suppose I'll drop Mark an email on that one of these days.

I'll do a transcript in the next fifteen minutes.

EDIT: much longer.

[placebo]

Here's your transcript, gents:

Freeman:Ready?

Freeman:First of all, do you have any comments to make on the advantages of having 64-bit processors?

Sweeney: Yeah, that's going to be a big feature of Unreal Engine 3, that we support both 32-bit and 64-bit out of the box, this'll be big in PC games.

Freeman: Do you see any benefits of running 64-bit CPUs? Is there any performance benefit?

Sweeney: Yeah, compiled code runs faster because you have twice as many registers to work with, but also with Unreal Engine 3 we're really pushing the content... we'll be able to use high-resolution textures with more detail in the environment and that'll be a great thing on PC, which is a really scalable platform.

Freeman: Yeah, also, will it support dual CPUs?

Sweeney: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so Unreal Engine 3 is broadly targeting multi-core CPUs, Sony has something like that with the Cell architecture, and Microsoft has that with the three CPUs in the Xbox 360 and, you know, Intel and AMD are already out with dual-core CPUs in the PC market.

Freeman: And do you also see a performance benefit running dual CPUs? Because most games now, they don't support dual processors, so you don't really see a performance benefit.

Sweeney: Well, Unreal Engine 2 just runs single-threaded so you don't get a significant benefit from it but in Unreal Engine 3 you'll be able to do rendering and animation updates and physics in multiple threads so, I wouldn't say it would double, but it'll increase performance significantly.

Freeman: Okay, and will the PC version of Unreal 2007 differ from the Xbox 360 version?

Sweeney: Well sure, PCs...

Freeman: [interrupting]: I mean, talking graphics-wise.

Sweeney: Well, the PC is a more scalable platform, so it'll run on $500 PCs and it'll scale down to the Xbox 360 and it'll run on a $3000 SLI machine with dual kickass Nvidia cards in it and it'll run with even more detail. So we'll be all over the place.

Freeman: And are the shaders in Unreal Engine 3, are they being developed with HLSL [High Level Shader Language]...?

Sweeney: Well, Unreal Engine 3 has a high-level material system, and in ours you connect your different material effects together in a graphical way, so in the end it does translate to HLSL on Microsoft platforms, and CG on the Sony and Nvidia platforms. But it's not really what you see when you're working on the engine, you see the really high-level artist-friendly shader system.

Freeman: And does the DirectX 9.0 shader compiler do as good at producing optimized code compared to, like, hand-writing the shaders?

Sweeney: Yeah, well, we look at all the generated code from the HLSL compiler and it's within, you know, 2-5% of hand-optimized assembly code, so, it's at the point where it's good enough where we'd never ever touch assembly again.

Freeman: Sounds good to me. Will Unreal Engine 3 support Pixel Shader 2.0?

Sweeney: Yeah, so we'll ship on any reasonable DirectX 9 hardware; the Geforce 6200 at the low end and the ATI Radeon 9800.

Freeman: How about Pixel Shader 1.0, like Geforce 4?

Sweeney: We're not planning on it, but we might decide at the end of the project to do a crappy backwards-compatible hack for the really old hardware but we look at that like we look at software rendering in UT2004: it's not beautiful but it works.

Freeman: I think you added software rendering later in the Unreal Engine 2.

Sweeney: [nods] Right.

Freeman: And will a 6800 Ultra be able to run Unreal Engine 3 with all the options maxed at 1024 by 768?

Sweeney: Yeah, 1024 by 768 should be perfect for an Ultra, of course by the time Unreal Tournament 2007 ships at the middle or the end of next year, you'll have even higher-end cards than that; you'll have four times the performance, so you'll be able to run 1600 by 1200 on those.

Freeman: And do you have any support for real-time soft shadows?

Sweeney: Yeah, we have support for stencil shadows which are hard-edged, we support real-time soft shadows, for soft shadowing of characters and characters casting shadows in the environment, and we support pre-computed shadows. So our objective with Unreal Engine 3 is to give artists this big toolkit of shadowing effects that they can select from so they can make the tradeoffs between performance and visual quality.

Freeman: First of all how do you pronounce [Ageia]? Is it ahgheeah, or ahjeeah?

Sweeney: It's 'ahjeeah'.

Freeman: Okay! How will that affect the performance of Unreal Engine 3 running on a hardware physics engine as opposed to a software physics engine?

Sweeney: Well, the big thing there is how we'll be able to put far, far more physical effects, with things like particle systems, and fluid effects, where without the Ageia system, we'll have a particle system with only a few hundred particles, and with the system, we could have tens of thousands of particles there. And it's really nice, because it mirrors the kind of non-traditional processing power that's available on the Playstation 3 with the Cell architecture, so it's a factor of ten times more computing power, but it's very special-purpose.

Freeman: And what's your opinion of dual-core GPUs? Does a dual-core GPU, is it more efficient than an SLI system?

Sweeney: It seems like it should be about the same comparing a dual-core GPU to an SLI system, maybe a bit faster because the on-chip communication is faster than your PCI-Express bus.

Freeman: Okay, one more question: R520 or G70?*

Sweeney: [laughs] Oh, G70 for sure.

Freeman: Okay, thanks a lot.

Sweeney: Thank you.

* The R520 and G70 are, respectively, the latest leg of ATI and Nvidia's next-generation graphics hardware roadmap that will be announced in the coming years.

[Vive_le_Quebec]

OK, so for optimal performance on UT2007, you need:

a 64-bit processor

*actually, a dual-core 64-bit processor
(does that require a 64-bit operating system like Longhorn?)

*a next generation Nvidia card

*physics processing unit

Is that it?

I HOPE by the time UT2007 comes out I won't have to change every component in my machine if they change the form factor from ATX to BTX. But perhaps the socket 939 might still be available by that time.

So, my shopping list in 2007 might be...
-motherboard
-CPU & heatsink
-physics processing unit
-graphics card

And maybe new RAM if I want to give my current mobo/cpu/heatsink/video card to a member of my family.

[Xipher]

Originally posted by Vive_le_Quebec
OK, so for optimal performance on UT2007, you need:

a 64-bit processor

*actually, a dual-core 64-bit processor
(does that require a 64-bit operating system like Longhorn?)

Well, if you want to be able to use both cores in 64 bit, yes, except XP Pro 64 will work fine

Originally posted by Vive_le_Quebec
*a next generation Nvidia card

*physics processing unit

Is that it?

I HOPE by the time UT2007 comes out I won't have to change every component in my machine if they change the form factor from ATX to BTX. But perhaps the socket 939 might still be available by that time.

So, my shopping list in 2007 might be...
-motherboard
-CPU & heatsink
-physics processing unit
-graphics card

And maybe new RAM if I want to give my current mobo/cpu/heatsink/video card to a member of my family.

Basicly, this is where I see it

you got it just about nailed. Although don't forget, you will probably end up using an SLI setup, so thats "graphics cards"

[Samix]

Neato. My 6600GT should fare fine.

Now we have to worry about RAM, how do you cram all those textures, bumpmaps, specular maps, meshes, characters, scripts, guns and stuff into 512/768/1024mb of ram?

[Xipher]

Originally posted by Samix
Neato. My 6600GT should fare fine.

Now we have to worry about RAM, how do you cram all those textures, bumpmaps, specular maps, meshes, characters, scripts, guns and stuff into 512/768/1024mb of ram?

512MB probably, but 1GB will probably be better.

[[NBS]Flak]

Thank you Placebo.

[Vive_le_Quebec]

I wonder how large the file will be. Imagine, over 20 GB and 3 DVDs. Something like that.

My old machine has a 15 GB HD. LOL

[jakup]

Originally posted by placebo
I congratulate on your ability to be in the presence of an Epic employee without ejaculating/drooling. It's good that you had a set of very pointed and worthwhile questions to ask. I would have loved to know about Mac/Linux support though.

Thats why I got it on video. So I could take it home and ejaculate to it later

Thats a good question on the Linux/Mac support, I would of asked if I had thought of it earlier...