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We continued our
DirectX testing with what is arguably the "best looking"
game available today, Epic's Unreal Tournament 2003.
UT 2003's graphics definitely raised the bar when it was
released. With image quality enhancing features like
AA and Anisotropic filtering enabled, UT 2003 can bring just
about any video card currently available to its knees.
For this test, we used a special utility to ensure all of
the cards were benchmarked using the exact same in-game
settings and "High-Quality" graphical options. Here's
what we found...
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Performances Comparisons
With UT:2003 |
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Some of the most advanced visuals to date |
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Without any
Antialiasing or Anisotropic filtering, the Leadtek A300
Ultra TD performed very well, and even managed to overtake
the Radeon 9800 Pro at 1600x1200. Once we enabled AA
though, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra's performance dropped off
sharply and both the Radeon 9800 and 9700 Pros crushed it.
In fact, at 1024x768 with 6X AA enabled, the Radeon 9800 Pro
outperformed the A300 Ultra by 86%! Ouch. Last
year's darling, the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 took a pounding by the
hands of the newer cards as well, but it still pulled off a
very respectable 62.1 FPS at 1600x1200.
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Benchmarks / Comparison
With
Quake 3 Arena v1.32 |
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I
have watched so many Q3 Timedemos, I'm seeing them
in my sleep... |
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That's enough
DirectX testing for one sitting, what do you say we move on
to some OpenGL action with the Granddaddy of all benchmarks,
Quake 3 Arena? We installed the latest point release,
v1.32, and ran some tests using the built-in timedemo, "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...
My, my how things have changed! :) As expected,
all of the cards performed very well in these tests.
With the exception of the GeForce 4 Ti4600, all of the cards
posted playable frame rates at both resolutions, regardless
of whether or not AA and Aniso filtering were enabled.
At default settings, the Leadtek A300 Ultra TD outpaced the
competition, but once AA and Aniso were enabled the Radeons
took over. At 1024x768 with AA and Aniso enabled, the
Radeon 9800 Pro pulled ahead of the A300 Ultra by about 10%.
The lead grew to about 20% when we raised the resolution to
1600x1200 with the same settings.
Serious Sam, Some Overclocking & The Conclusion...
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