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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.

I've not been using UT2004 for a while now in our graphics cards reviews as this game has to be one of the titles with the biggest CPU bottleneck ever. Since we're testing CPU's today, well I figured let's have a look and see if we get a performance difference. It's obvious that's the case. There's still massive CPU limitation though.

Doom 3

At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the Internet. It's now 2004 and the game has finally been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say its well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you mayve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmacks own algorithm. Im sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.

Will you please look at the difference in 1024x768 (10x7) between the Pentium 4 at 3600 MHz versus the FX-57 at 2800 MHz? Now that's what we call clock for clock based performance. The FX-57 will slaughter the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz processor with a 30 FPS difference.