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Benchmarks
With Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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DX8
Performance |
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Unreal
Tournament 2003
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Epic's Unreal
Tournament series has consistently been one of the most popular
first person shooters, and by no coincidence is it also one of the
most commonly used video card benchmarks.
We continued our DirectX benchmarking with a completely
patched, retail version Unreal Tournament 2003.
When benchmarking with UT2003, we use a utility that ensures
all of the cards are being tested with the exact same
in-game settings and "High-Quality" graphical options.
We ran the UT2003 benchmarks at resolutions of 1024x768
and 1600x1200 without anti-aliasing, and then again with 4X
and 6X AA enabled. We kept Anisotropic filtering
disabled here because NVIDIA and ATi aren't doing the
same level of trilinear filtering when aniso and
trilinear are enabled together. |
With anti-aliasing disabled at
both resolutions, the MSI FX5950 Ultra walked away with a
couple of wins, but once AA was switched on the Radeons
jumped way out in front. When 4X was enabled, all
three of the cards remained competitive, with only 6 - 8 FPS
separating the first and last place finishers. When we
enabled 6X AA, however, NVIDIA's current flagship simply couldn't
keep up.
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Splinter Cell |
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Stealth Pixel Shading |
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Splinter
Cell
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Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three
pre-recorded demos
in addition to a benchmarking feature. The demos
included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU
performance, however, so we used 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 the realistic looking ocean
water surrounding the Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a
night vision effect.
As we've mentioned in the past,
anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter cell (at least
with the current version). Due to this fact, we do
not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
NVIDIA based video cards have
traditionally struggled in the Splinter Cell benchmark, and
while performance has increased incrementally with each new
driver release, they still are unable to catch-up to ATi in
this test. The MSI FX5950 Ultra lagged behind both the
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB and the Radeon 9800 XT at both
resolutions.
Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests
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