Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X

Name: Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X - Page 7
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 19, 2005, 10:00 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 permitted it. Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a patched (v3355) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200, without any anti-aliasing and with 4X AA and 8X aniso both enabled together. In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of a multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

Looking at the graphs above, it's clear that Unreal Tournament 2004 is CPU bound in the 1024x768 test with the current generation of graphics cards. All of the cards we tested performed at similar levels in both test configurations at the lower-resolution, with the Radeons holding onto a slight lead overall. Once we raised the resolution to 1600x1200, however, the performance has a much more decisive trend. At 1600x1200, the Radeon X850XT Platinum Editions finished yet another group of tests in the top spot, outperforming the GeForce 6800 Ultra by approximately 4.2% - 21.2%.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, SAP, XT, AG, X8, AP

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