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Benchmarks
With Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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DX8
Performance |
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Unreal
Tournament 2003
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Epic's Unreal
Tournament series has consistently been one of the most
popular first person shooters, and by no coincidence is
it also one of the most commonly used video card
benchmarks. We continued our DirectX benchmarking
with a completely patched, retail version Unreal
Tournament 2003. When benchmarking with UT2003, we
use a utility that ensures all of the cards are being
tested with the exact same in-game settings and
"High-Quality" graphical options. We ran the UT2003
benchmarks at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200,
without anti-aliasing and then again with 4X and 6X AA
enabled. We kept Anisotropic filtering disabled
here because NVIDIA and ATi aren't doing the same level
of trilinear filtering when aniso and trilinear are
enabled together. |
In all but two
test scenarios, the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT was the
best performer in the Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark.
At 1024x768, using every level of anti-aliasing, the
Sapphire card outperformed the competition. When we
raised the resolution to 1600x1200, Sapphire's 9800 XT again
outran the Asus card and the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra when 6X
AA was enabled, but when no anti-aliasing or 4X
anti-aliasing was used the 5950 Ultra was the victor.
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Splinter Cell |
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Stealth Pixel Shading |
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Splinter
Cell
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Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three demos
in addition to a benchmarking feature. The demos
included with the patch at somewhat limited by CPU
performance, however, so we used a 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 the
realistic looking ocean water surrounding the Oil Rig in
the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect.
As we've mentioned in the past,
anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter cell (at least
with the current version). Due to this fact, we do
not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
It was another
strong showing for the Radeon 9800 XTs in the Splinter Cell
benchmark. The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra was about 8.9%
slower than the Sapphire Radeon 9800 XT at 1024x768.
With the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, the gap widened
a bit with the Sapphire card surging ahead of the 5950 Ultra
by almost 14%. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra obviously it
couldn't keep up with the heavy-hitters in this test, but at
less than half the cost, its not really expected to.
We've included the scores in this review simply as a point
of reference.
Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests
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