Gaming Benchmarks: Unreal Tournament 2003

Settings: Texture Detail: Highest, World Detail: Highest, Character Detail: Highest, Physics Detail: Normal, Character Shadows: ON, Dynamic Lighting: ON, Detail Textures: ON, Projectors: ON, Decals: ON, Coronas: ON, Decal Stay: Normal, Foliage: ON, Trilinear Filtering: ON. We ran the Antalus flyby-scene.

Unreal Tournament 2003 loads the cards much more than Quake3 Arena.

In 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions, the CPU becomes the bottleneck in the system: we can see no difference between the results in different quality modes.

The Direct3D part of the driver for NVIDIA GeForce FX seems to be not yet optimized to the level of the ATI’s driver. That’s why ATI RADEON 9700 PRO is ahead in 800x600 and 1024x768. But in higher resolutions the situation changes in favor of GeForce FX.

It looks as if the hardest test for GeForce FX 5800 Ultra in Unreal Tournament was the immense amount of textures. You can see how low the performance drops in the “Application” mode that uses true tri-linear filtering and highest LOD. Still, GeForce FX makes up for the lag behind RADEON 9700 PRO in the “Application” mode by getting ahead in “Balanced” and “Aggressive” modes.

When 4x full-screen anti-aliasing is used, ATI RADEON 9700 PRO reduces the gap to NVIDIA GeForce FX in “Balanced” and “Application” modes and catches up with it in 1600x1200. The lower memory bandwidth of GeForce FX tells on its results here.

The difference between the results GeForce FX shows in different quality modes is startling! That’s a clear demonstration of how optimized anisotropic filtering tells on the performance.

In the “Application” mode, GeForce FX performs anisotropic filtering like NVIDIA GeForce4 does, so we can’t even dream of high speed: GeForce4 loses to RADEON 9700 PRO in the “Quality” mode. But the fastest mode of NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, namely “Aggressive” mode, is faster than the “Speed” mode of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO.

4x full-screen anti-aliasing added to anisotropic filtering makes GeForce FX lose all its advantages and even lose its top position in 1600x1200 resolution.