
We continued our
DirectX benchmarking with Unreal Tournament 2003. When
testing with UT2K3, we use a special utility that is
supposed to ensure all of the cards are being tested with
the exact same in-game settings and "High-Quality" graphical
options. Unfortunately, the validity of the GeForce
FX's scores have been called into question because the
texture filtering level changes to something between
trilinear and bilinear when Anisotropic filtering is enabled
(click
here for more detailed information on this topic).
We're told future driver updates should solve this problem
and allow true trilinear filtering, but this hasn't happened
yet. Until it does, take these results with a grain of
salt.
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Performances Comparisons
With UT:2003 |
Tim
is the Man |
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At 1024x768 the
V9950 Ultra couldn't catch the Radeon 9800 Pro until 4X
anti-aliasing and 8X aniso were simultaneously enabled.
All of the cards performed similarly in most tests, except
for the ones where we enabled 6X AA. With 6X AA
enabled, the Radeon 9800 Pro took a commanding lead.
With the resolution set to 1600x1200, the V9950 Ultra pulled
ahead of the competition without AA, with 4X AA and with AA
and Aniso enabled together, but the Radeon once again jumped
way ahead with 6X AA enabled.
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Benchmarks / Comparison
With
Quake 3 Arena v1.32 |
With
Every Review, Doom 3's Release Gets Closer! |
|
That's enough
DirectX testing for one review. Let's move on to some
OpenGL testing with the venerable Quake 3 Arena. We
installed the latest point release (v1.32) and ran some
tests using the built-in time demo "four". Before
running these tests, we set Quake 3 to the "High Quality"
graphics option with Tri-Linear filtering enabled, and then
we maxed out the texture quality and geometric detail.


The NVIDIA
powered cards don't support 6X anti-aliasing in OpenGL
applications, which is why you'll notice "N/A"s listed in
our graphs for this, and the next set of tests. The
V9950 Ultra led the pack in all but one configuration in the
Quake 3 Arena tests. At 1024x768 with AA and Aniso
enabled, the Radeon 9800 Pro outpaced the 5900s by about
10%. In every other test though, the V9950 Ultra was
the top performer; sometimes by a margin approaching 20%.
Some Serious Sam, Overclocking & The Conclusion...
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