Downloads - Unreal and Unreal Tournament
There are four main options to choose from for HD Unreal textures. The best choice is the two listed below as "recommended" - One for Unreal 1 and one for Unreal Tournament. Then next is the Techdemo Beta Textures
The v3.5 UTX versions below are the best of all worlds for quality, performance and compatibility between different renderers.
v. 3.5 - Recommended version for Unreal-
Download lower res LE version - 2gb
Compatible with Unreal 227, online servers, and modern renderers
v. 3.5 - Recommended version for UT99-
Download lower res LE version - 3gb
Compatible with UT99 v436, 469, online servers, and modern renderers
Alternate version for Unreal-
You can use these instead of the normal HD textures.
This pack for Unreal has all of the earliest HD textures restored, done by Epic and Diehard. The remaining missing textures are by AHaigh01. The v3 pack replaced or altered most of the oldest textures with updated ones. Here, you can see all of the originals in action, but now with no missing HD textures.
There have been HD textures for Unreal for a very long time now. In fact, within a year or so of the game's release Epic "remastered" many of the most often seen textures to showcase the new S3TC high res features. But making the game textures fully S3TC HD was far from complete. Diehard took on the work of trying to complete them, and spent 10 years making textures, but still about half of the textures were low res. In the last few years AHaigh01, who had already contributed some HD textures and skins, finished off the entire HD pack. In the process, many of the older HD textures were updated or replaced to make them closer to the originals.
The visual style difference in this pack is most noticeable in maps like the Vortex Rikers, the outdoors levels, the mines, the castles, and some others. Epics HD textures from 20+ years ago tend to have vivid colors and a more cartoonish style compared to the low res originals. Epic did about 250 of the textures in HD, which were often the most frequently seen textures. Diehard did more than 1000, notably many of the Vortex Rikers (PlayerShp), DecayedS, SkyCity and lots of the environmental textures. There were many levels that were never completed in HD in the early years, like the temple maps and ISV Kran. These are now all filled in from the main release of the HD pack.
Alternate version for Unreal and UT-
HD4K DDS External Textures v3.5 for the Direct X 11 renderer
Note: DX11 (D3D11) renderer (v.1.6.1) is not compatible with the 227J or 227K patch for Unreal, only 227i. The renderer developer is no longer supporting it. The 469 UT99 patch does still work with it, however.
The "normal" UTX versions of the HD textures offer the best performance and compatibility, however: The DX11 renderer offers some advantages for the S3TC HD textures in this pack, especially if you are working with UnrealED or experimenting with the textures.
- The textures work for both Unreal and Unreal Tournament - separate versions are not needed
- The textures don't replace the original low res .UTX files - UnrealED will run as normal
- The original textures will be seen in-game with renderers other than DX11
- The HD textures don't take memory away from the (limited) game memory - the video card takes on the memory load of the textures.
- The user can customize and experiment with the individual .DDS files
- Model skins can also run as external .DDS files, allowing for online use of HD skins - stay tuned for future releases
Download the renderer
This pack has been tested with a new gaming PC and the performance is excellent, however some users experience performance issues. The 4K Extreme DX11 version is very dependent on the speed of your PC and video card. You should run them with the original low res utx files installed for best performance - not over the top of v3 HD utx version as you may get stutter. You don't have to use the 4K Extreme DX11 HD pack just because you are running the DX11 renderer. Performance will be better with the v3 UTX pack.
HD Addons
- The HD Castle1 UTX was not included prior to the current 3.5 version of the main HD pack. Although Castle1.utx shipped with Unreal, It was not used in the Unreal game, but it is used in a few custom maps. I recently made the textures HD. Also included is Castle1RyS which is based on the same textures. Both UTX and DDS versions are included in this pack.
- If you want to see the new Castle1 textures in action, this is one of the best maps for it. The problem is the map uses the textures as MyLevel so I had to make a special release of the textures just for the map.
- Here is a link to the map pack where you will find CTF-UTR-Dargrok
If you are running UT99 436, it is highly recommended that you apply the '4GB memory aware patch' to avoid out-of-memory crashes. The UT 469 and Unreal 227 patch have already fixed this issue.
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