the update probably won't do anything performance wise. it's still the same engine. the updated engine will probably have some new features but i doubt it will improve performance for lowend users since it's not really what the engine was designed far. now if map creation is made easy or not. the tools of the trade have not changed. there is however the possibility that the new engine update also brought fixes for their development kit. Back in the day when i made maps for unreal tournament 3 the tools could sometimes be quite buggy. One wrong move and you could end up with a collision hole in your geometry. The entire editor could crash under certain curcumstances or your map would get corrupted(very important to create backups ) you really had to pay attention not to cause these bugs so you needed to understand what causes these bugs in the first place and workaround them. I don't how much the development kit has changed since them but bug fixes in the kit itself can boost productivity quite a bit
Well, how a game performs using a given engine is more dependant upon the developer than the engine I upgraded my CPU/GPU recently and with the previous hardware I had varying performances across 3 UE3 games UT3: Not great S8P: Pretty good at lower end gfx MNC: Sameish as S8P
true but there is not going to change much to the game. it will have the same graphics and maps. and given the fact that the game isn't really a high polycount game i really doubt the devs would be finetune the maps. improvement, if any, could be on part of the engine. the updated engine could use more efficient math to render stuff for example which will increase overall performance. UT3 has quite high quality textures and models which tasks the gaphics quite a bit even under low load. with UT3 is could be so great that having to many objects in view in one direction could reduce the framerate to a crawl. thats were optimization comes and many neat little tricks MNC maps have far lower polycount and texture complexity then UT3 has so it can work quite well on lower end gfx
