Unreal Tournament 2003

We tested with the following game 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, Tri-linear Filtering: ON. We tested in Flyby-scene from Antalus.

The graphics cards were tested in default modes.

In Unreal Tournament 2003 the new NVIDIA GeForce FX chips performed slightly worse than in OpenGL games. The eldest solution of the newcomers, GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, only in high resolutions managed to get a little ahead of GeForce4 Ti4200-8x. The slowest of the new cards, GeForce FX 5200, in its turn appeared a little faster than GeForce4 MX440-8x.

It is remarkable that in Unreal Tournament 2003, just like in OpenGL games, a more flexible GeForce FX 5600 Ultra proved much faster than GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, with only 10% higher working frequency.

If we compare the newcomers’ performance with the competing solutions from ATI, new NVIDIA chips will look twofold: on the one hand, ATI RADEON 9500 Pro outperforms GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, but on the other, ATI RADEON 9000 Pro is unable to compete even with GeForce FX 5200.

With enabled full-screen anti-aliasing NVIDIA GEForce4 Ti4200-8x without frame buffer compression support, and ATI RADEON 9000 Pro and GeForce4 MX440-8x using supersampling method, draw back quite s lot, which allows even NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra to almost catch up with GeForce4 Ti4200-8x.

The slowest of the newcomers, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 from Albatron, turns over 1.5 times faster than the most probably rivals, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x and ATI RADEON 9000 Pro, due to multisampling support.

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro is again not even within reach for the new NVIDIA solutions.

When we enabled anisotropic filtering, NVIDIA GeForce MX440-8x leaves the race, because it doesn’t support 8x anisotropy.

Among those graphics cards left, the evident victory was won by ATI RADEON 9500 Pro in Performance anisotropic filtering mode, and RADEON 9000 Pro completely defeated NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra as well as GeForce4 Ti4200-8x. However, these results of RADEON 9000 Pro appeared incorrect: the numbers indicate that forced anisotropic filtering simply didn’t work in Unreal Tournament 2003.

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, which doesn’t support the new “fast” anisotropic filtering algorithm, draws back in this test quite noticeably, so that in 1600x1200 even GeForce FX 5200 managed to beat it.

In the heaviest mode with enabled full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at the same time, the results remain almost the same, with that only exception that ATI RADEON 9000 Pro using slower supersampling rolls down to the last rating position.