MSI N280GTX-T2D1GOC, GeForce GTX 280 Redux

Name: MSI N280GTX-T2D1GOC, GeForce GTX 280 Redux - Page 5
Brand: MSI

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 01:09 PM EDT

One of our "emotional favorites" for benchmarking, as well as letting off a bit of steam, due to its short learning curve and big fun coefficient, would have to be Unreal Tournament 3. This game engine also doesn't tax ultra high-end cards like the GeForce GTX 280 but its rendering engine certainly makes it one of the best looking first person shooters on the market currently.

Unreal Tournament 3

DirectX Gaming Performance

Unreal Tournament 3

If you're a long-time PC gamer, the Unreal Tournament franchise should need no introduction. UT's fast paced action and over the top weapons have been popular for as long as Epic has been making the games. For these tests, we used the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 3. The game doesn't have a built-in benchmarking tool, however, so we enlisted the help of FRAPS here. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, but with the UT3's in game graphical options set to their maximum values, with color correction enabled.

Here all the cards we tested, even the more mainstream GeForce GTX 260, show themselves to offer completely playable frame rates right up through our top resolution of 2560x1600. In addition, the MSI N280GTX card is in a virtual dead heat with the other GeForce GTX 280 cards we tested.