Thief graphics technology detailed, makes use of "heavily modified" Unreal Engine 3

A sly thief like Garrett needs the darkest shadows he can find.

A sly thief like Garrett needs the darkest shadows he can find. Thankfully, the team behind the upcoming Thiefreboot has its sights set on cranking up the PC edition's visuals—shadows and all—according to an interview with Eidos Montreal's technical art director Jean-Normand Bucci at Dark Side of Gaming.

"The PC version will support all the graphical features of the next-gen consoles with numerous improvements, including even better anti-aliasing, higher resolution shadows and support for multi-monitor," Bucci said. "Thief on PC will also be amongst the first batch of games that support AMD's new Mantle APIfor high performance graphics."

The minimum specs for the PC haven't been nailed down yet, but Bucci said Thief will make use of a "heavily modified version" of Unreal Engine 3 and includes a number of tweaks that are PC-specific. An FOV slider—super useful in a first-person game like Thief—and mouse sensitivity options are also set to be included, according to Bucci.

"We don't apply acceleration or smoothing to our mouse based camera controls—we want you to have direct control of Garrett's POV," he said.

Since both the next-gen consoles now share so much DNAwith PCs, let's hope the visual appeal and interface control of un-modded, multi-platform games like Thief won't be as much of an issue as it sometimes has been in the past. And Thief has been looking gorgeous for a while now, even as there's been some thoughtful chin-scratchingabout how the latest entry in such a classic series will handle Garrett and his stealthy gameplay. If you're curious about how game has been playing , check out our recent hands-on. Thief releases February 25.