Conclusion: Graphics Cards for UT2004

Now let us try to put the UT2004 performance facts straight for every graphics card we tested.

• ATI RADEON 9800 XT is the fastest graphics card money can buy for Unreal Tournament 2004. Whether you play with all eye-candy enabled or just in pure mode, the RADEON 9800 XT will be the fastest in majority of the cases.
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is the second fastest graphics card for the UT2004 game, the results of our tests tell us. While the babe is sometimes pretty close to the RADEON 9800 PRO, it outperforms it in the majority of the cases and even runs on par with the leader.
• ATI RADEON 9800 PRO that was unveiled a little bit less than a year ago is still a very nice graphics card. It is behind the two leading solutions, but the gap in performance is not large, while the price of the 9800 PRO is tangibly lower compared to newer products.
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 is also a good graphics card for the Unreal Tournament 2004, it allows you to get rather high frame rates, but maybe the part just does not have the best price/performance ratio?

This is not a news that ATI offers excellent technology for high-end graphics cards. But what about mainstream solutions?

• If the battle between ATI RADEON 9600 PRO and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra was clearly won by ATI, it is very hard to distinctly tell which of today’s performance-mainstream solutions is better.
• ATI RADEON 9600 XT, ATI RADEON 9500 PRO and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra show very close performance figures, but in quite a lot of “eye-candy” cases the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra modestly wins. Moreover, knowing that UT traditionally requires geometry power, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra may be the best choice among mainstream offerings that are available now because of its three high-speed geometry engines.
• S3 DeltaChrome S8 delivers “pure” performance even higher compared to the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. Unfortunately, DeltaChrome does not work in “eye-candy” modes, which is why we consider the GeForce to be a better choice for the UT2004.
• There is nothing good I really can say about XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra. This one is below any critics, I am afraid.

Conclusion: Graphics Demands of UT2004

We did not concentrate on image quality, uncovering possible cheats and carefully investigating every single aspect of performance. We can prove that there are no major issues with graphics quality on ATI, NVIDIA and S3 hardware, though, our aim was not to detect such problems, but to examine the possible “out of the box” experience.

ATI RADEON 9800 XT		NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

Here is how the Unreal Tournament 2004 looks like on ATI RADEON 9800 XT (on the left) and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (on the right) graphics cards.

The Unreal Tournament 2004 is nearly here. Today we have got a demo version with less-detailed textures to measure performance of graphics cards we have at hands here. We discovered that even with “normal” textures quite some mainstream graphics cards cannot give us enough speed. The results with highest quality textures will be even lower, therefore, if you want to play the UT2004 at full-speed with excellent quality – consider buying a high-end graphics card.