Performance in Unreal Tournament 2003

Unreal Tournament 2003 is the only benchmark left from the old gaming test package, which we have bee using on our site. During the tests in this game I used 32bit modes and maximum graphics quality settings: Texture Detail - Highest, World Detail - Highest, Character Detail - Highest, Physics Detail - High, Character Shadows - ON, Dynamic Lighting - ON, Detail Textures - ON, Projectors - ON, Trilinear Filtering - ON, Decals - ON, Coronas - ON, Decals Stay - High, Foliage - ON, Use Blob Shadows - OFF.

All test were run in my own demo-record created in Unreal Tournament 2003 DM-Inferno level:

So, here come the results:

ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards run almost neck and neck:

When we enable full-screen anti-aliasing, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra start dashing ahead of the competitors from ATI, especially as the resolution increases. They manage to win due to higher memory bus bandwidth, which is more important for performance at high screen resolutions.

Anisotropic filtering was forced not in the driver but in the game settings. When this function was forced in the driver, the ATI based graphics card wouldn’t apply tri-linear filtering to base textures of Unreal Tournament 2003, but only anisotropic filtering, even though the driver was forcing the Quality mode. This is the result of ATI’s anisotropic filtering “optimization”, when even in the Quality mode anisotropic and tri-linear filtering are enabled only for the zero texturing stage, and for all additional textures only anisotropic filtering is performed.

NVIDIA’s chips also boast some “optimizations” for tri-linear and anisotropic filtering algorithms. For example even in the Quality mode GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra do not actually use the fully-fledged tri-linear filtering, but a “mixture” of tri-linear and bi-linear filtering methods (see our NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Review for more details).

However, this trick didn’t help NVIDIA chips here: ATI RADEON 9800 XT and 9800 PRO manage to defeat them due to faster though less quality anisotropic filtering algorithm.

Enabling FSAA doesn’t change the picture at all: ATI RADEON 9800 XT and RADEON 9800 PRO are still ahead.

So, Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark didn’t reveal anything new: the performance in older games has long been studies inside out, so the results of Unreal Tournament 2003 could really be predicted with pretty high precision.