UT3 learns from Gears

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has said Unreal Tournament 3 will benefit from the lessons learned by creating Gears of War for Xbox 360.

Not only has it given the developer practice with multi-core systems, it's also allowed the team to create an engine that runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs.

"The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC," Sweeney told PC Games Hardware.

"Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the USD 10-20 million range."

Judging by Sweeney's comments it looks as though a system with a DirectX 10 graphics card, dual or quad core processor, and over 2 gigabytes of RAM is what you'll need to get the most out of the game.

Unreal Tournament 3 was recently confirmed for Xbox 360 as well as PC and PS3. It's due for release later this year, although publisher Midway was unavailable to tell us exactly when. However, it seems this will be another case of "it's out when it's out".

"UT3 has always been about being done when it's done," added Sweeney. "We're taking our time with the game because the UT franchise is very important to us and we want to get it right for this, the third generation in the series."

Head over to our Unreal Tournament 3 gamepage for more information.