Is Unreal really worth it?

22/6/98
Last night I tried a Glide "wrapper" for Rendtion chipsets. What it basically does is emulates all the Glide stuff and allows cards like mine (Stealth II) to run 3DFX based software. Well there are a few bugs but this guys seems to have done a real good job of it. Even with all the emulation stuff the game is running HEAPS faster than in software mode. I have another version to try out tonight which fixes a lot of the bugs but it at least gives me a look at what the OpenGL version should do.

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16/6/98
Woohoo!!! Just found this at BJorn3D:

We expect D3D and OpenGL should be very similar. Tonight I ran Unreal on our very first working OpenGL driver (Rendition V2200). The visuals were right on par with the Glide version we have on 3DFX. The performance was slower than Glide but that's to be expected at this early stage. We think we can get it a lot closer with some more work.

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15/6/98
Well, let me tell you that I was pretty excited about getting hold of Unreal, but now I'm wondering if it will be worth it.

At the moment Unreal doesn't have any OpenGL rendering support. In fact the only native cards that are supported are Voodoo and PowerVR. So my Rendition based card has to run it in software mode and it aint pretty! To get any real speed I'm running it at 320x200 and even then whenever I encounter some sort of walking or moving alien, it thrashes and goes all jerky.

I'd expect more from a 200MMX / 32Mb and a 3D graphics card, but I may be wrong. Anyway there's a couple of other things that irk me besides the performance:

• Perspective - is it me or does it always feel like you're a midget when you play? The crates look like bloody skyscrapers and I just get the feeling that I'm a head running around on the ground!
  
• Movement Speed - It's probably me and my PC again but when I'm outside moving around, or going through the water, I feel like I'm wading through mud.