Unreal Gold
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Unreal Gold is a bundle that includes the 1998 game Unreal and its 1999 expansion pack, Return to Na Pali. For Unreal Gold, both games were updated to use the newer Unreal Tournament engine, which supports Direct3D, Glide, and software rendering.
The Unreal Tournament engine's software renderer is one of the most advanced ever developed. It features colored lighting and a form of texture filtering, but is extremely CPU intensive. The engine was primarily designed to run in Glide mode on 3dfx video cards. The Glide renderer is well optimized, and set a new standard in visual quality at the time.
While the Unreal Tournament engine also includes a Direct3D renderer, this is not as mature as its Glide counterpart. The Direct3D renderer is much slower, especially in 32-bit color, and has problems with gamma correction. Unreal Gold requires a relatively fast video card when running in Direct3D mode, and 16-bit color is recommended for optimal performance.
On newer Windows XP systems, the best way to play Unreal Gold is through the semi-official Oldunreal patch. This patch improves performance and visual quality by adding Direct3D 8, Direct3D 9, and OpenGL renderers. Oldunreal is not available for Windows 98.
Unreal Gold has a developer console accessed with the tilde key (~). A few important console commands are listed below.
Unreal Gold uses VSync by default, but this can be disabled through the preferences menu described above.
The Unreal Tournament engine's software renderer is one of the most advanced ever developed. It features colored lighting and a form of texture filtering, but is extremely CPU intensive. The engine was primarily designed to run in Glide mode on 3dfx video cards. The Glide renderer is well optimized, and set a new standard in visual quality at the time.
While the Unreal Tournament engine also includes a Direct3D renderer, this is not as mature as its Glide counterpart. The Direct3D renderer is much slower, especially in 32-bit color, and has problems with gamma correction. Unreal Gold requires a relatively fast video card when running in Direct3D mode, and 16-bit color is recommended for optimal performance.
On newer Windows XP systems, the best way to play Unreal Gold is through the semi-official Oldunreal patch. This patch improves performance and visual quality by adding Direct3D 8, Direct3D 9, and OpenGL renderers. Oldunreal is not available for Windows 98.
Unreal Gold has a developer console accessed with the tilde key (~). A few important console commands are listed below.
- preferences - opens an advanced configuration menu
- timedemo 1 - activates timedemo mode for benchmarking
Unreal Gold uses VSync by default, but this can be disabled through the preferences menu described above.