HIS Radeon X850 XT and Radeon X800 XL - IceQ II Turbo
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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 permitted. 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 anti-aliasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled together. In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of an on-line multi-player match for our benchmark runs. |
At 1024X768 the entire performance field is bunched up pretty tightly as a result of these graphical settings becoming more CPU bound than anything else. There is a slight edge to the HIS X850 XT but beyond that comparable cards are pretty much nip and tuck.
When we turn up the resolution things begin to spread out a bit but within each performance class, X850 XT versus GeForce 6800 Ultra and X800 XL versus GeForce 6800 GT, it's pretty much a photo finish. Let's move on to some more demanding tests. Clearly if you're a UT2004 player any of these cards will offer top notch performance.
