MSI RX800: Radeon X800 XT (PCI Express)

Name: MSI RX800: Radeon X800 XT (PCI Express) - Page 9
Brand: MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 10:00 PM EDT

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 anti-aliasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled together. In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of an on-line multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

Unreal Tournament 2004 was essentially CPU bound at 1024x768 when using a 16-pipe card like the MSI RX800 or the GeForce 6800 GT. Even with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled the high-end cards performed similarly. With the resolution turned up to 1600x1200 we get a clearer picture as to which card is the higher performer in Unreal Tournament 2004. At the higher resolution, the Radeon X800 XTs, and in particular the MSI RX800, outperformed the GeForce 6800 GT by as much as 15% whether or not anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were used.

Tags: MSI, Radeon, PC, Pre, MS, PCI Express, XP, pci, express, XT, X8

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com