Page 8
Unreal Tournament 2004
Added into our wide benchmark suite is Unreal Tournament 2004. The developers of UT2004 didn't want to split hairs with this game. It is still using the same engine and the majority of gameplay elements will be very familiar to players of the 2003 version. If you hated the first game, you'll probably hate this.
Sorry, but that's how it is. This large-scale, vehicle-focused game concentrates and focuses the action so that 12 players can have as much fun as 32. It includes several different gameplay modes including Onslaught, where each team has a power core that they need to protect. Between the teams' power cores are a number of smaller power nodes scattered across the map.
Buggies, hovercraft, tanks, trucks, space fighters, air fighters all feature prominently in Unreal Tournament 2004, and huge maps have been made to accommodate them.
What we customized for Unreal Tournament 2004 was the configuration, which is now set at the highest possible image quality. Next to that we recorded a really ridiculously-intensive-on-the-system time demo. The results then are compiled to an average, which is you average framerate. Again with default settings the framerate on your home machine would be somewhat higher as we go for the best possible settings available.
Okay, finally something we can play. The settings and custom timedemo we use are truly overkill so at 10x7 you'll play the game quite swell. With good 3D quality.
AquaMark 3
The latest graphics cards on the market are all DirectX 9 compatible these days, and we also see an increasing number of games utilizing the new DX9 features. To be able to see how well a graphics cards is performing in this new challenging DirectX 9 environment, AquaMark was developed.
The AquaMark3 benchmark delivers scores for specific hardware components as well as an overall score for the entire system. AquaMark3 is highly qualified to meet the needs of gamers because it's as close as possible to a typical game application. The AquaMark benchmarking series is based directly on the huge code and data base of the AquaNox games and the underlying krass game engine."
In the past we have used AquaMark 2.3 in our benchmark suite and although still a reputable application, Massive figured it was time for the next best thing. This is AquaMark 3, a benchmark that will utilize some of the finest DirectX 9 capabilities like Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0, and yet is by far not as Shader dependant as, for example, Half-Life 2 is. You will notice this in the overall results later in this article.
AquaMark 3, however, is not solely a DirectX9 benchmark; if you are working with a DirectX 8 or 7 compatible graphics card, you will still be able to use it just with a lot of graphical features missing. Make no mistake, AquaMark3 is a DirectX 9 benchmark. But since it's based on a real game engine it has fallbacks to DirectX 8 and even DirectX 7 that makes this software not a 100% DX9 benchmark.
Download: Aquamark 3 (63 MB)
*cough*
