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Benchmarks
With Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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Canned Fly-By demos or custom in game demo runs,
you decide. Benchmark optimizations?
You bet... |
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Epic's Unreal
Tournament has consistently been one of the most popular
shooters, and by no coincidence is it also one of the
most widely used benchmarks for video card testing.
There are many variants to testing the demo version,
one of which
is to use a "Fly-by", which plays back a recorded tour
of many of the game map levels. Here in the labs,
we use a custom INI file that maximizes the graphical
settings, and then displays the average frame rate for
three strenuous resolutions. We chose the
1024x768x32 and 1600x1200x32 scores for our reports,
with and without anti-aliasing enabled. |
We also then
recorded a custom demo run of a small bot match within the
"Curse3" map, that involves 4 bots in a fairly vigorous
fire-fight. This test we feel is more indicative of
real-world game play. Here are the results.
There's an
interesting display of scoring here in the playing field.
The GFFX5950U edges out the Radeon 9800XT in the standard
Phobos map fly-by demo with a 5% lead or so. However,
in our real world gaming situation and custom Curse3 Bot
Match (agreeably a more CPU intensive scenario but you don't
run fly-bys to play the game), the Radeon 9800XT takes the
lead by ever so slight margin of 1 - 5%, dependant upon if
AA is enabled or not. We should note that just for
kicks, we also ran a quick demo recording of a Bot Match we
played in the Phobos map. The results were consistent
with the Phobos fly-by numbers above, the GFFX 5950U beat
out the R9800XT by about 5%, with an 84.3 to 80.6 score
result respectively. So, it seems as though certainly
the cards have their strengths and weaknesses depending on
the maps you are gaming in, for UT2003. However,
overall the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, with it's new Det 52.16
drivers seems to have the edge here, since the spread was
much tighter when ATi took the lead in the Curse3 bot match.
Here the chips fall fairly
close together once again, with one caveat. The Radeon
9800XT with it's Catalyst 3.8 driver set, shows a 10%
advantage with 4X AA enabled in the custom demo and the race
is also tighter in the Phobos fly-by, with 4X AA as well.
This could be explained by NVIDIA's IQ improvements with AA,
that we showed you earlier here. While they're AA now
looks as good as ATi's in UT2003, they are still taking a
larger performance hit with what seems like a less efficient
AA engine. Regardless, the R9800XT also takes a very
small lead in the Curse3 custom demo without AA as well.
X2 - The Threat And Spinter Cell
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