The second part of AnandTech's GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 article is now up, looking at CPU scaling. A bunch of CPUs tested with 19 GPUs using Unreal Tournament 2003, showing you how much performance increases (or not) with a faster CPU.

So E3 was a couple of weeks ago, and I finally managed to get a video interview I conducted with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski at the show edited and up on the net. I asked Cliff about Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal 2 and even Unreal Warfare though don't expect any shocking news about that. You can grab the 13 minute video from FileShack courtesy of Speakeasy in two flavors, a 21mb Windows Media file or a 76mb MPG version (Note that the popup might be slow, just keep the window open and it will load after a while). I apologize in advance for sounding incomprehensible and Dutch at times ;) However it doesn't really matter as CliffyB's answers should be clear enough. Enjoy the great production values!

Update: Unfortunately a sound error managed to end up in the final version, slightly interrupting Cliff's voice at around the 6 minute mark. I have re-encoded the video to fix this. Both versions have been replaced.

There are nine Unreal Tournament 2003 videos on the German Giga Games, showing more from the upcoming multiplayer shooter. The videos run for some 25 minutes total.

GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 - July 2002 is an article on AnandTech, benchmarking various videocard GPUs in Unreal Tournament 2003. There are several GeForce and Radeon chips, as well as the Kyro 2, all of them being benchmarked in two levels from the game in resolutions from 640x480 to 1600x1200.

Matt Powers, Tim Hess, Richard Iggo of Infogrames and Mark Rein of Epic Games have all been interviewed on Multi Player Zone. They answer various questions about the Unreal franchise and the upcoming Unreal Tournament 2003.

Modelling site Polycount has a summary of a recent mod summit that Epic Games held, to show off the power of the new Unreal engine and tools. There's some info in there that's probably of interest to you mod makers.

Received an update on Unreal Tournament 2003, giving us an idea on how the game is coming along. The update is rather lenghty so we've posted it on a seperate page. Here's a snip

On the sound side we have some amazing news! Dolby Laboratories informed us today that we are officially Dolby Digital 5.1 certified! UT2003 will be one of the first PC games to ship with true Dolby Digital support. Of course this requires hardware that has DD5.1 which today includes any Nvidia nForce motherboards but more hardware is on the way. Dolby is just as excited about this as we are, the report we got back said UT2003 had "perfect 5 channel panning!". Of course on add-in cards like Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Audigy we'll also deliver an awesome 5.1 performance so you don't have to have Dolby Digital to have 5.1 sound. read more...

Epic's Jay Wilbur has been interviewed on Computer & Video Games, where he's quizzed about Unreal Tournament 2003. There's not a whole lot of newinfo in there but if you don't want to miss anything related to the game, check it out.

Mark Rein (Epic) made quite a lengthy post on one of the UT community forums. He talks about the recent commotion about the leaked Unreal Tournament 2003 "demo".

A leaked early test version of UT2003 is floating around the internet. It is not representative of the quality or performance of the final game. [...]

He continues to address some topics brought up by forum participants:

I think the closest we came to guessing (and yes, it was still just a guess) was that the demo would be out around the end of E3 or a few weeks after that. So far we're still "a few weeks after" E3 and working furiously to get the demo out as soon as possible. There are few big things we're still tinkering with such as the server browser.
[...]
The version of the game out there (the "leak") is missing a whole bunch of features. It has mediocre performance, lacks a ton of AI code, has unfinished levels, doesn't have Karma physics in it, has unfinished menus, lacks a ton of sound effects and music, has unbalanced, untweaked weapons, and generally is indicative of something still too early to even be called "beta". Perhaps knowing this will discourage the real fans and customers from obtaining this version and tainting their initial impressions of UT2003.

There's a ton more of information in the same post. Anyone asking for the leak, what it's like, or even insinuating/hinting on any possible place to get it will be banned.

Some Unreal Tournament 2003 demo news on the official game forums. Since the demo release was first rumored to be released during E3 (two weeks ago), but wasn't, people were probably expecting it to be released any day now. Here's the official word from Epic's Mark Rein

We understand you are anxious for the demo but posting "where is the demo" threads here won't make it appear any sooner. When we think we're close to the demo (i.e. within 5-7 days) we'll let everyone know officially through this forum. We're not there yet, we're still more than a week away. We could be more than two weeks or even more than three weeks away. We're not holding out on people, we're just not done with the game yet and although a lot of the game is coming together very quickly we still have no 100% (or even 80%) accurate way to predict exactly when that will be. I promise the development team is working very, very hard to get an awesome, polished UT2003 in your hands. The demo will be released when we think we've got all the major functionality of the game complete so that the feedback from the demo can be focused 100% on things we weren't already aware needed to be addressed.

Thanks David Barrack.

HomeLAN Fed has six new screenshots from Unreal Tournament 2003, Digital Extremes' upcoming multiplayer shooter. A demo of the game should be released soon.

Unreality managed to get some info out of Epic's Mark Rein on what we can expect the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo to contain. Looks like it will have two deathmatch maps, a double domination map, a CTF map and a bombing run map. There's no date for the demo as of yet, and of course the contents might change.

4unrealers has a Q&A up with Tim Sweeny. The interview clarifies that there is NO set date for the UT2003 demo, but that it is "close". Other topics include system requirements, frame rate caps, vehicles and engine design. A very good and compact interview, if I may say so.

GameSpot has posted a few new movies from Unreal Tournament 2003, showing gameplay from the upcoming Digital Extremes game. Only one movie is available for free, you have to be a GameSpot Complete member for the other eight.

To make up for all those Unreal Tournament 2003 previews recently lacking any new screenshots from the game, Digital Extremes has now released 28 shots from the upcoming multiplayer shooter. Some might be familiar though, but most of them seem new.

Beyond Unreal has an interview with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski. Cliff answers questions about Unreal Tournament 2003, its editor and a few other things.

Beyond Unreal has conducted an interview with Pancho Eekels, of Digital Extremes. As you would expect, the interview is about the upcoming Unreal Tournament 2003. One of the things mentioned in the interview is that the demo will be released AFTER E3, so it won't be out next week.

Infogrames has opened the official Unreal Tournament 2003 site, offering a bit more info on the upcoming shooter from Digital Extremes. There's a list of features, the story of the game and a brief FAQ. Six low res and (mostly) dark screenshots are available on the site as well. Thanks Blues News. Rumor has it that a demo of the game will be released some time next week.

UnrealOps has posted the third and final part of their look at Unreal Tournament 2003, based on a recent visit to the Digital Extremes office. This part takes a look at the gameplay modes.

The latest Unreal Tournament 2003 preview is up at XGR, where they also have som impressions of the press event in general, in addition to impressions of the game.