Unreal Tournament 2004

There is almost no effect from CrossFire in Unreal Tournament 2004 as you can clearly see in 1600x1200 resolution. These are probably some driver issues or a flaw in the Compositing Engine, but the latter is rather unlikely.

The RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire is faster at doing 8x Super AA, but the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI follows it closely – the gap is never bigger than 10%. The RADEON X1000 is in general not very efficient in games that don’t have many complex pixel shaders.

As we increase the Super AA/SLI AA coefficient we noticed a very curious thing: the performance of GeForce 7800 GTX SLI didn’t go down compared with what it demonstrated in the previous mode. At the same time RADEON X1800 CT CrossFire dropped down dramatically, which used to be typical only of the NVIDIA multi-GPU platform that supports SLI AA 16x. We repeated the tests multiple times, but with no success: the results remained the same. The problem is most likely to be with the ATI CATALYST drivers, because we have already experienced the performance issues with them in Unreal Tournament before.

Metallurgy demo is not so CPU dependent as Torlan and you can notice the effects of another problem caused by ATI CATALYST drivers in Unreal Tournament 2004. The problem is the relatively low maximum result for the RADEON compared to what the GeForce can reach. Anyway, even if CrossFire does provide a performance increase compared with a single RADEON X1800 XT, this advantage is not very high and doesn’t exceed 6-8fps.

The situation we observe in Super AA 8x/SLI AA 8x is similar to what we see on Torlan level: in 1024x768 resolution the leadership belongs to GeForce 7800 GTX SLI, but in higher resolutions RADEON X1800 XT CrossFire is the winner, because it boasts ore attractive technical specs. The difference can only be observed in one resolution: for the Torlan level it is the 1600x1200, and for the current level - 1280x1024. The performance of both multi-GPU platforms is high enough, so all resolutions in Unreal Tournament 2004 are playable in FSAA 8x + AF 16x.

The problem we have already described during the discussion of gaming performance in Torlan repeats here. In Metallurgy the performance of GeForce 7800 GTX SLI remained the same, while the performance of RADEON X1800XT CrossFire dropped down quite rapidly.