ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004 Epic's Next Smash Hit!

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 permitted it. Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a patched (v3323) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200, without any antialiasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled together.  In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of an online multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

At 1,024 x 768, our custom Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmark didn't show either of the flagship cards in this review, the X850 XT Platinum Edition or the GeForce 6800 Ultra, as having a meaningful advantage.  The GeForce took the lead in the default test, only to fall behind the X850 once AA and aniso were enabled.  With UT 2004 running at 1,600 x 1,200, however, the ATi-powered cards surged ahead.  In the high-resolution test, the Radeon X850 XT PE outperformed the X800s by a few percentage points, but it smoked the 6800s.  The X850 XT PE was about 6% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra when tested at 1,600 x 1,200 without any antialiasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and it was a hefty 33% faster once 4X AA and 8X aniso was used.