Despite inconviniences typical of a beta, this Unreal Tournament III demo must be enough, for the time being, to get an idea of the requirements of this game.

An important point to remember is that, although the final version will be more "polished", the frames per second we see in this Anandtech article are probably higher, because it's not testing with high quality textures and the scenarios are devoid of characters.

Among the most relevant conclusions we can come to, let's say that cache size brings up to a  20% performance increase for the Core 2. Another element to take into consideration is the number of cores the processor has, which can translate into a 60% gain (when going dual) and a 13% one (when going Quad). On the other hand, raising the frecuency  of a Core 2 Duo from 2 GHz to 3,33 GHz only gets us a 28% boost.

And what of the graphics cards? nVidia wins, although AMD keeps pace at the same price range (Radeon HD 2900 XT and X1950 XTX vs NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 320MB and 7900 GTX).

Shacknews attends in Cary, North Carolina, an Unreal Tournament 3 press event, where Epic's vice-president Mark Rein, issued this statement Monday night:

"The development team feels they're pretty close to being ready to release this," said Rein on the Epic forums, "so it could come out this week but for safety sake I'd say it should be out within two weeks."

Rein specifies that the demo will feature standard online play, as well as single player mode:

The Settlers is an strategy game based on building more than fighting. In that respect, is closer to Caesar than Starcraft. Up to version 5, the chains of production were quite long, so they have decided to trimm them a little, to make the game more accessible. But there's still only three wall breaking machines and you can just create are archers and swordsmen. This would still give you some tactical options, but since the units form in groups, the second they come into contact with another group, things turn out pretty chaotic. Wins who has a bigger army. Building is no longer as entertaining, it seems, and combat hasn't been improved. Not much to say in favor of it's gameplay.

Turning to graphics things are somewhat better, since the last installment came out, The Settlers left aside it's cartoonist look and geared towards a more realistic approach that made it the best looking strategy game in the market until Age Of Empires III was released. The sixth part continues this vein and gets the game up there with the best ones, but there appears to be some major bugs: you can’t save the game and you probably won’t be able to play for more than an hour due to some crashing that happens randomly.

If this problems are sorted out via a patch, the game could still be recommended to fans of the genre almost solely on it's nice looking graphics.

Link: Driver Heaven.

¿Do you have an "old" PC? ¿Any intention to play Half Life 2: Episodio 2? Then you won't want to miss this review where Anandtech takes a look at a good deal of processors and graphics cards to see how they handle both indoors and outdoors situations.

The processors: they chose basically among dual core offerings, which is good given their current price point. From a Pentium E2140 to a Core 2 Duo E6750, from an Athlon 64 X2 4000+ to a 6400+. Several quads (QX6850, Q6700 and Q6600) are also included. Aside from the fact that, once again, Intel tops all the charts, it's interesting to see the Core 2 distributed in groups that relate to cache size. Over the weeks prior to it's release, there was quite some controversy regarding Conroe's dependency on L2. Now that we have 1, 2 and 4 MB models, we see that Half-Life 2 is affected by it. So it is by FSB, quite a benchmarking tool, this game.

The graphics cards: they didn't come short on them, neither. We get entry level, mainstream and performance segment representatives from both nVidia and ATI. All of them are tested at different resolutions, under indoors and outdoors scenarios and even with some AA benchs.

Minimum System Requirements
• Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
• 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
• 512 Mbytes of System RAM
• NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

Recommended System Requirements
• 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
• 1 GByte of System RAM
• NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

Those are the requirements, where's the oddness? As GPUReviews points out, this is a "The Way It's Meant to be Played" game, so it should favor nVidia hardware. But it doesn't. Unless they've found some serious problems with Geforce cards, there's no way a 9600 can catch up with a 6200 (128 bit?). And mixing in the same bag a 7800GTX with an X1300 is simply hilarious. Again, maybe there's something wrong with the game, but even if their internal testing suggests these kind of pairings, they should ask a little bit more from the ATI camp.

I'll believe they are actually recommending those requirements when I get one copy of the game from the selves and turn it around.

Morgan from Web Alert (the hot chick from the news video to your left) reports the takings for Halo 3 for the first 24 hours of sales. Are you sitting comfortably - 170 million.

 Is the game anygood? Yes. Brilliant. It's bigger, better and just what Xbox 360 owners expected. The graphics are stunning, the maps huge (you really do need a 42" HD Plasma to start to do it justice) and the AI on harder settings a real bitch. We haven't even got to multiplayer yet although split screen Co-op is a little disappointing due to the forced 4:3 aspect - it's hard to play as the maps are so huge you can't see the enemies shooting at you in the distance. Online the playability should be tremendous with 4 player Co-op through the entire campaign and a host of other multiplayer options.

Sure everybody was expecting even more from this final episode but given the limitations of the 360, we think Bungie have done us proud.

When a game is so graphically stunning as this one, you need to know what options are there, which ones are important, what impact do they have on performance and what (in essence) can you expect from your hardware. Will it be up to the task?

As described in the article, the main options are:

- Texture Quality (High, Medium and Low)

- World Detail Distance (again, three settings)

- Water Quality (with the two options you can see above)

- Anti-Aliasing (4x, 2x and Off are compared)

The whole list takes several pages long, but you can always use presets for a quick tuning. Even the medium preset could do the job of delivering nice looking images, but it will quite taxing on your machine anyway.

Link: Bit-tech. 

Ubisoft has released three full games on FilePlanet for download completely free of charge. However these games are supported by ads which appear during loading screens. These titles include Far Cry, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Rayman Raving Rabbids.

I personally tried Farcry and PoP: Sands of Time earlier and they are two of my favorite games. Its really interesting to see these games available for free download. If you really wish to play these games, don't hesitate to download them right away as we don't know if these games will be free forever.

PS: FilePlanet's download service sucks though unless you are a premium member. 

Jekyll & Hyde.

What can be said about this game? It has every right to be a big hit: graphics, storyline, playability (according to reviews), you name it. But just check this article at the inquirer and you will probably think twice before buying it.

Are these people out of their minds? Do they want to fight piracy or to promote it? DRM is bad enough, but the things described about this title and the way it's being commercialized are utterly unacceptable. Really, I can't add anything more to this debate without consulting our legal department first. Draw your own conclusions.

To help you do that, here you can see some screenshots and here is one of the praising previews. 

Another DX10 title, another RTS game. But if we are to believe the previews this is not just another one among the bunch. Also, from what we can see in the screenshots, graphics look great. Add to that, the use of Havok for physics, and this time we are dealing with something big. Mark the developers words:

"[...] there will be DX10-exclusive features in the game. There will be one or a few of those, and they will look pretty amazing. We're not telling what they will be yet, but they're up and running at our office right now, and we're experimenting with them, but they look amazing.".

World in Conflict is set to hit stores on September 18th. This Sierra publishing contiues an old tradition that can be tracked down as far away as "Operation: Cyberstrom", where you don't get to build massive armies like you would while playing an "Age Of Empires" or "Command And Conquer" series of games. You get to focus on fighting tactics by having limited credits to buy units with, for each mission. No building/collecting to distract you from the killing. A different approach to that of Blizzard, but with similar results.

Massive Entertainment has released a demo that weights no less than 1.2Gb, the demo offers a singleplayer tutorial and mission, one multiplayer map with 16-player support and a skirmish mode. You can grab it here.