VIA's K8T900 Chipset
Next we delved into the gaming side of things a bit and performed some low-resolution benchmarking with Epic's Unreal Tournament 2004. We specifically used a "Low-Quality" game setting with UT2004 which allows us to isolate CPU and memory performance with little burden on the graphics subsystem.
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In Unreal Tournament 2004's low resolution testing, the K8T900 competed closely with the comparison test bed, topping it by a fraction of a frame per second.
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For our next game test, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom multi-player Doom 3 timedemo. We cranked the resolution down to 640 x 480 and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Doom 3 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings it's more CPU / Memory-bound than anything else...
Doom 3's low resolution testing showed the VIA K8T900 reference motherboard lagging the nForce 4 SLI comparison system by 1 FPS, which leaves us safely declaring a tie at these frame rates.
