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. First results, FlyBy:

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. As you can see the product positions itself right where it should be, between the Ti 4200 and 4600. Does AGP8x matter over 4x with this product ? The answer should be: marginal, very hard to measure.

We'll look at behavior of the graphics card for performance settings like Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) however test only one mode. That's 4xAA + 8xAF which basically means 4x Anti aliasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering enabled. Let's have a look at BotMatch results:

Again you can notice very decent results. The GeForce4 engine however lacks the raw power with heavy image quality settings enabled in higher resolutions. Let's go to an AMD Athlon 1800+ platform and see how well it handles:

As you can see not bad either eh ? In 16x12 you'll notice a graphics card limitation. Only overclocking the card can make that framerate go higher in that resolution.