Editing Unreal (1998 video game) (section)

===Graphics===
The ''Unreal'' engine brought a host of graphical improvements rarely seen at that time. ''Unreal''{{'}}s [[software rendering|software renderer]] allowed software features as rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of [[texture filtering]] referred to by Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" [[dither]].<ref>Yong, Li Sheng. [http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Texturing_As_In_Unreal.shtml Texturing As In Unreal], flipcode.com, July 10, 2000.</ref> Early pre-release versions of ''Unreal'' were based entirely on software rendering.

''Unreal'' was one of the first games to utilize [[texture mapping|detail texturing]]. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex ([[high-resolution]]) instead of becoming increasingly blurry.<ref>[http://www.opengl.org/resources/code/samples/sig99/advanced99/notes/node88.html 6.20 Detail Textures], OpenGL.org, August 6, 1999.</ref> Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors, pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, golden metal doors, and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief. For many years after ''Unreal''{{'}}s release (and ''Unreal Tournament''{{'}}s release), detail texturing only worked well with the S3 MeTaL and [[Glide (API)|Glide]] renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the ''Unreal.ini'' file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver, while it was present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original [[S3 Savage|S3 Savage3D]] and [[3dfx Interactive|3Dfx Voodoo Graphics]].

Because of ''Unreal''{{'}}s long development time, the course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid progression of hardware 3D accelerators. Along with the advanced software 3D renderer, ''Unreal'' was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide [[application programming interface|API]], which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development. When ''Unreal'' was finally released, Microsoft's [[Direct3D]] API was growing rapidly in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. Direct3D renderer, however, released initially to support the new [[Matrox G200]], was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues.<ref>[http://unreal.com/press/matrox_pr.html MATROX OFFERS SNEAK-PEAK AT UNREAL DIRECT3DPATCH] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061113204050/http://unreal.com/press/matrox_pr.html |date=November 13, 2006}}, [[Epic MegaGames]], September 24, 1998.</ref> ''Unreal'' also had official [[OpenGL]] support.