Performance: Direct3D Gaming Benchmarks

Among DirectX-using games we picked up Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell. So, what does RADEON 9500 PRO have to show us in Direct3D?

Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2225, Antalus Flyby

The new game engine from Epic is more complex than the Quake 3 one. It uses a lot of modern technologies and requires much more from the graphics card. The R300 architecture shows itself up: RADEON 9500 PRO beats the competitor black and blue, especially with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering. Overclocking helps to widen the gap even more.

Splinter Cell v.1.2b, 1_1_1 Tbilisi Demo

This game uses a modified version of the UT2003 engine and requires even more from the graphics chip computing power. Here are the results:

Well, only the 1024x768 resolution seems to be suitable for playing and only without FSAA. Drivers from ATI Technologies showed their capricious character here: anti-aliasing wouldn’t turn on together with anisotropic filtering in 1600x1200. NVIDIA was no better: 2x FSAA didn’t work at all and we have the same results in the first and second work modes. It’s not quite clear whether the drivers or the game itself are to blame, however. We should only mention that only RADEON 9500 PRO shows acceptable performance in this test.