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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Unreal Tournament 2004 |
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Epic's Next Smash Hit! |
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Unreal Tournament 2K4
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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 allowed it! Epic recently released the
latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament
2004. We used the demo version of the game to
benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and
1600x1200,
without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, with 4X AA and 8X
anisotropic filtering and lastly with 4X AA and 16X
aniso. |
We ran a timedemo that uses the
"Colossus" map on all three of the cards.
Unfortunately, the lower-resolution benchmark doesn't yield
much useful information because the test was CPU limited on
both GeForces and the Radeon, regardless of whether or not
anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering was used. When
we upped the resolution to 1600x1200, however, things got a
little more interesting. The GeForce 6800 Ultra was still
CPU bound, until we enabled 4X AA and 8X aniso concurrently.
The Radeon 9800 XT's and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra's
frame-rates, on the other hand, dropped off quite a bit once
we enabled AA and aniso at the higher resolution.
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Performances Comparisons
With Splinter Cell |
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Stealthy Combat |
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Splinter
Cell
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Splinter
Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded
demos and incorporates a previously unavailable
benchmarking tool. The demos included with the patch
are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we
opted for 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 realistic looking ocean water
surrounding an Oil Rig in the demo, as well as
simulating a night vision effect for a brief period. Also note that
anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter Cell. Due to this fact, we do not
have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
Score another decisive victory
for the GeForce 6800 Ultra. In the Splinter Cell
benchmark, the GeForce 6800 Ultra, yet again, outclassed the
previous generation's high-end cards. At 1024x768, the
6800 Ultra outperformed the 9800 XT by about 61% and it
smoked the 5950 Ultra by over 87%. With the resolution
set to 1600x1200, the GeForce 6800 Ultra's lead over the
9800 XT increased to 78% and its lead over the GeForce FX
5950 Ultra swelled to over 105%!
Final Fantasy XI & Tomb Raider: AoD
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