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| Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004 |
| Epic's Next Smash Hit! |
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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 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, and lastly with 4X AA and 8X aniso. |
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The Prolink Pixelview 5900XT Golden Limited was the leader in all but one of these benchmarks, routinely beating the evenly matched e-VGA 5900XT. In each test, the difference between the two varied from 2 frames at the lower resolution to 1 frame or less at 1600x1200. We also found closer scores in this test than in the earlier benchmarks, with the 5700 Ultra and 9600XT putting up comparable numbers in each test without Anisotropic Filtering.
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| Performance Comparisons With Splinter Cell |
| Stealthy Combat |
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Splinter Cell |
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. |
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The Splinter Cell benchmark has the two 5900XTs deadlocked, with a .04 FPS difference in the first test, and then exactly the same frame rate in the second. They continue their mastery over the other two mid-range cards, beating the 5700 Ultra handily by over 10 frames per second at 1024x768 and 7 frames at 1600x1200. That comes out to somewhere between a 35-40% difference in performance, yet these cards all fall within the same relative price point. The 9600XT put up much more comparable numbers, a much better showing with the newer drivers than what we have seen in the past.
