Tim Sweeney/Unreal Engine 3 Interview
Overview
Date: May 20, 2005
Original URL: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=50895
Synopsis: Tim Sweeney at E3 2005
Questions
Jacob Freeman:
First of all, do you plan on supporting 64 bit CPU’s in a 64 bit environment?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
Do you see any benefits of running 64-bit CPUs? Is there any performance
benefit?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
Yeah, also, will it support dual CPUs?
Tim 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.
Jacob 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.
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
Okay, and will the PC version of Unreal 2007 differ from the Xbox 360 version?
Tim Sweeney: Well sure, PCs...
Jacob Freeman:
[interrupting] I mean, talking graphics-wise.
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
And are the shaders in Unreal Engine 3, are they being developed with HLSL [High
Level Shader Language]?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
And does the DirectX 9.0 shader compiler do as good at producing optimized code
compared to, like, hand-writing the shaders?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
Sounds good to me. Will Unreal Engine 3 support Pixel Shader 2.0?
Tim Sweeney: Yeah, so we'll ship on any reasonable DirectX 9 hardware; the Geforce 6200 at the low end and the ATI Radeon 9800.
Jacob Freeman:
How about Pixel Shader 1.1, like Geforce 4?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
I think you added software rendering later in the Unreal Engine 2004.
Tim Sweeney: [nods] Right.
Jacob Freeman:
And will a 6800 Ultra be able to run Unreal Engine 3 with all the options maxed
at 1024 by 768?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
And do you have any support for real-time soft shadows?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
First of all how do you pronounce [Ageia]? Is it ah-geea?, or ah-jeea?
Tim Sweeney: It's 'ah-jeea'.
Jacob 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?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
And what's your opinion of dual-core GPUs? Does a dual-core GPU, is it more
efficient than an SLI system?
Tim 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.
Jacob Freeman:
Okay, one more question: R520 or G70?
Tim Sweeney: [laughs] Oh, G70 for sure.