Preacher sends word that Epic's Mark Rein posted to the Unreality.org Message Board with some comments on Saturday's Epic-hosted Unreal Tournament LAN party:

Actually what the event was was us showing up to do some testing on a big LAN with a bunch of people who hadn't played the game before. We're going to do it again next week. There's no point having 50 people come out if there are only 14 machines. Next week we are hoping to bring some Savage4, TNT2 and Rage128 video cards to test. The TNT's would have performed considerably better were it not for a bug in the version we brought that prevented us from using low and medium texture details. We knew about this bug.

UT performance is roughly the same as Unreal - in some places it's maybe even a little faster. If you have enough machine to play Unreal then you have enough machine to play Unreal Tournament. The performance you witnessed on a Celeron 400 would have been roughly the same on anything from a PII 266 and upward. All the improvements that are in the latest Unreal 225 version are also in Unreal Tournament. It plays quite well over the internet.

We've improved TNT performance a LOT under D3D in the most recent version of Unreal (225) and we're continuing to work with Nvidia to get even better performance out of their cards. We did experience some problems with the TNT cards on Saturday because a last-minute bug forced to use only the absolute highest setting for texture detail (higher than the default setting) which isn't suitable for machines that have less than 128Mb of RAM - these had 64Mb. That ended up causing lots of disk swapping which gave an inaccurate picture of TNT performance which otherwise would have been quite acceptable. This will be fixed in time for next week.

In related news, Billy "Screenshots" Wilson has posted two new UT screenshots on that newly redesigned page of his.