GeForce FX 5800 Ultra - The review - Performance - Unreal 2003

Since the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo is finally out, and available for a free download. You can get it at just about any file download site (link). Be prepared to download 100MB of data though. 

One nice little addition to UT2003 demo is that it has a built-in benchmark utility.  You can find the benchmark in the system subdirectory for the game after it installs.  The file is appropriately named 'benchmark.exe'.  Run this file, select the resolution you want to benchmark, and it will go through 4 different demos, 2 are "flyby" and 2 are "botmatch" demos.  The flyby demos give you an idea of how high frame rates would be without bots, while the botmatch demos give you an idea of what kind of fps you can expect while actually playing the game. The benchmark actually leverages more cpu and graphics intensive technologies that the engine is capable of.

Score is in Frames per Second, the higher the better.

As you can see I took a somewhat different approach on benchmarking in this review. First of all we'll benchmark along with a lot of other graphics cards. As you can see the FX comes of with a rough start at 10x7 with it's competitor. It's all driver related though as you really need to take a look at highest resolutions if you want to take an objective look at graphics cards versus their performance. As you can see in 16x12 the GFFX takes back the crown yet looses with a small fraction in quality optimised settings in 4xAA and 8xAF.

Let's take a look at cummulative behaviour of the graphics card once we test performance settings like Anti Aliasing (AA) and AAnisotropic Filtering (AF).

It's very interesting to see how AF is handling performance. Unreal 2003 takes the biggest hit in all benchmarks yet it is already clear to see how efficient the GFFX handles AF. Let's move on to Anti Aliasing.

I think it's safe to say that might be a bug at 1600x1200 in the xS (Scewed Grid modes) as the outcome in all three tests was 42 Frames per Second. Take that aside and once again you'll notice how darn efficient GeForce FX is.