S3's DeltaChrome S4 Pro

Name: S3's DeltaChrome S4 Pro - Page 7
Brand: S3's

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, July 14, 2004, 12:00 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 allowed it! Epic has recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used the full version of the game, with the latest patch installed, to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1204, without any anti-aliasing and with 2X anti-aliasing and 8X Anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

When testing with our custom demo in Unreal Tournament 2004 without any anti-aliasing, the DeltaChrome S4 and GeForce FX 5200 Ultra performed at very similar levels. At 1024x768, less than .5 frames per second separated the S4 and 5200 Ultra, and at 1280x1024, there is only a 1.12 FPS spread between the two. As expected, the very inexpensive Radeon 9200 SE, with its 64-bit memory bus, lagged way behind. With 2X anti-aliasing (the S4's maximum setting) and 8X Anisotropic filtering enabled, the cards finished in the same order, but the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra extended its lead over the DeltaChrome S4 to about 21% (1024x768) and 47% (1280x1024).

Tags: S3, Chrome, Delta, S4, rom, pro, AC

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