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Rainbow Six®: Raven Shield is the sequel to the immensely popular Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six®: Rogue Spear, 2000 Action Game Of The Year, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six®, 1999 Action Game Of The Year*. It will be the third game in the Rainbow Six line, which has sold more than 6.7 million copies worldwide.

The Rainbow Six franchise is known for its action-packed game play and heart-stopping realism, and Rainbow Six®: Raven Shield will continue the tradition. Developed by Ubi Soft's Montreal studio, in close collaboration with Red Storm Entertainment, Rainbow Six®: Raven Shield features a brand new Tom Clancy storyline in which Team RAINBOW is led all over the world in a string of dramatic operations. The game will utilize graphics technology provided by the next-generation Unreal™ engine to power 15 new single-player missions that include the discovery of a cache of biological weapons and stopping an armed gang from terrorizing a London bank.

Screenshots: @ 3D Gamers
View: Official Raven Shield website

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These performance numbers are averages seen while actually playing the game. The bottom line is that people with these kinds of video cards are going to be able to see why this game is so special, they're going to have fun playing it and they'll see how upgrading their systems will get them a better presentation.

On the sound side we have some amazing news! Dolby Laboratories informed us today that we are officially Dolby Digital 5.1 certified! UT2003 will be one of the first PC games to ship with true Dolby Digital support. Of course this requires hardware that has DD5.1 which today includes any Nvidia nForce motherboards but more hardware is on the way. Dolby is just as excited about this as we are, the report we got back said UT2003 had "perfect 5 channel panning!". Of course on add-in cards like Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Audigy we'll also deliver an awesome 5.1 performance so you don't have to have Dolby Digital to have 5.1 sound.

Network performance is improved from the original UT. Bandwidth usage has been decreased which should help particularly for people playing over modems. We've also focused on optimizing server CPU utilization. AI and gamecode is undergoing a lot of tweaking and improvement. In this area the last 10% is the difference between a good game and a great game and, I said in a previous update, UT2003 is going to be a great game.

In terms of releasing the demo we're still over a week away, maybe over two weeks away but we are making very good progress and the game is coming together really nicely.

So we've still got to wait a little while longer for the demo, but at least those of us with TNT2's or 3Dfx cards will be able to check it out. Sure, it may run like an educational slideshow, but that's better than nothing, right?