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Benchmarks
With Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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DX8
Performance |
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Unreal
Tournament 2003
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Epic's Unreal Tournament series has consistently been
one of the most popular first person shooters, and by no
coincidence is it also one of the most commonly used
video card benchmarks. We continued our DirectX
benchmarking with a completely patched, retail version
Unreal Tournament 2003. When benchmarking with UT2003,
we use a utility that ensures all of the cards are being
tested with the exact same in-game settings and
"High-Quality" graphical options. We ran the UT2003
benchmarks at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200
without anti-aliasing, and then again with 4X and 6X AA
enabled. We kept Anisotropic filtering disabled in
UT2003
because NVIDIA and ATi aren't doing the same level of
trilinear filtering when aniso and trilinear are enabled
together. |
In the Unreal Tournament 2003
benchmark, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra walked away with a
couple of victories in the non-AA tests. With
anti-aliasing enabled, however, the Radeons pulled ahead of
the NVIDIA part.
The Abit Radeon 9800 XT and the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro both
finished in front of the 5950 Ultra by a few frames per
second with 4X AA enabled at both resolutions and in the
6X AA tests, the Radeons once again held onto significant
leads over the 5950 Ultra, with nearly 100% higher frame
rates.
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Splinter Cell |
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Stealth Pixel Shading |
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Splinter
Cell
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Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three
pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously
unavailable benchmarking tool. The demos included with the patch are somewhat
limited by CPU performance, however, so we used the
custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to
test with this game. Beyond 3D's demo removes two CPU
intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel
Shader performance. Shaders are used to render the
realistic looking ocean water surrounding the Oil Rig in
the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect.
As we've mentioned in the past,
anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter cell (at least
with the current version). Due to this fact, we do not
have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
With each new driver release, it
seems that the performance of NVIDIA's GeForce FX line of
cards gets a bit better in the Splinter Cell benchmark, but they are still
unable to catch the Radeons in this test. At both
resolutions, the Abit Radeon 9800 XT produced the highest
frame rates, followed closely by the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro
and then the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.
Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests
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