NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 Unleashed

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 Unleashed - Page 9
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 16, 2008, 09:00 AM EDT

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.

We saw more of the same with Unreal Tournament 3. In this game, most of the high-end cards produce somewhat similar results at 1,920 x 1,200, with only the GeForce 9800 GTX trailing considerably. At 2,560 x 1,600, however, the deltas get larger and the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 show their mettle. The GTX 280 was once again the fastest of the single-GPU powered card. It wasn't quite as fast as a 9800 GTX SLI setup, however. And scaling with standard SLI and 3-way GTX 280 SLI looked much like HL2:EP2 - because the test is CPU bound with that much GPU horsepower in the system, performance doesn't increase all that much, if at all.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, GTX, 260, GTX 260, GeForce GTX, GeForce GTX 280, force, GT, EA, id, and

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