AOpen GeForce FX 5900XT Review
UT2004 and Splinter Cell Testing
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 Unreal Tournament 2K4 |
Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular, ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003, rapidly became some of our favorites, for both benchmarking, and for killing a few hours when our schedules allowed it! Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used the demo version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024, without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA and with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering. |
In our Unreal 2004 tests, the 9600XT offered some good competition for the stock 5900XT. At 1024x768, the results were in favor of the 5900XT, with the 9600XT keeping a close second. At the 1280x1024 resolution, the results evened out somewhat, with the 9600XT keeping things close. But in the end, the 5900XT from AOpen held the top spot throughout. Overall, the additional speed of the GPU gave UT2004 the chance to break 60FPS at 1024x768 with 4X AA enabled.
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 Splinter Cell |
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 opted for 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 realistic looking ocean water surrounding an Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect for a brief period. Also note that anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter Cell. Due to this fact, we do not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
At both resolutions, the AOpen 5900XT maintained higher frame rates over the reference 5900XT. In both tests we saw an average of a 3-4FPS gap between the two 5900XTs with the other cards falling well behind.
