When Epic games showed off its next-generation engine called UnrealEngine3 everybody was impressed. Still the engine won"t be ready for another two years. Beyond3D has grabbed an interview with Tim Sweeney to talk about this awesome engine and what we can expect from it.
You have said that UE3 will target DX9-based video cards as the absolute lowest denominator, even to the point of saying DX9 cards such as the GeForceFXs and Radeon 9x00s will be brought to their knees in terms of performance. Using Valve"s yet-to-be-available Half Life 2 as an example, will UE3 be at all scalable starting from lesser-than-DX9-level video cards (by making available, perhaps, DX7 and/or DX8 paths) or did you really mean what you said, i.e. nothing but a DX9 video card will be able to run UE3-based games? If the latter is the case, you are saying you are not worried at all by gamers that, by the time UE3-games are made available, still own pre-DX9 (like the GeForce3 or Radeon 8500) video cards?
DirectX9 is our minimum hardware target for Unreal Engine 3. A great deal of generalization, improvement, and even simplification has been made possible by eliminating legacy code paths and formulating all rendering around fully-general pixel shader programs. If we were going to ship a PC game on UE3 this year, we certainly would have aimed lower, since those GeForce4 MX"s are very prevalent on very low-end PC"s today. But we"re looking further ahead, and as a result Unreal Engine 3 has become a great engine for next-generation console games and PC games aimed at the mass market in early 2006.