Tim Sweeney made an update to the Unreal Technology page outlining Epic's plans to implement DirectX 7 support in Unreal Tournament. Here's the lowdown:

Some people have been asking about our plans for supporting the upcoming DirectX7. Unreal Tournament will ship with DirectX6 support, and will be compatible with (but not optimized for) DirectX7. As soon as Microsoft has released DirectX7 and we've had a chance to optimize the code for DX7 and test it across a wide range of cards, we'll release an Unreal Tournament patch with complete DirectX7 optimizations. This has been the plan all along.

DirectX7 has lots of cool new features. The ones which Unreal Tournament will exploit are:

• Improved texture management.
• Hooks to enable 3D card drivers to perform their own texture management to improve performance.
• Optimized polygon path for significantly faster polygon rates.
• Windows 2000 support.