Performance - Unreal 2003

 Unreal 2003The Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark is much more modern than Quake III, this is not the Unreal 2003 performance test as used by some other websites, contrary to that, it's based on the demo.

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.

As you can see I took a somewhat different approach on benchmarking in this review. As you can see the product positions itself right where it should be, between the Ti 4200 and 4600 and in the range of Radeon 9500 Pro. Does AGP8x matter over 4x with this product ? The answer should be: marginal, very hard to measure.

You'll also notice the inclusion of Albatron Ti 4800 SE 3000+, an Athlon XP 3000+ press sample from AMD came in this week and I wanted to see the behaviour of the graphics card with such a processor. As you can see, in the lower resolutions it will gain performance while in the highest resolutions it'll remain the same. Why you ask ? Simple, the graphics card is maxed out. It can't calculate any faster even if you threw it on a 10 GHz Pentium 4.

We'll look at cumulative behavior of the graphics card for performance settings like Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) in a later part of this article.