X-bit labs

Immortal Combat: Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Preview (page 6)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 11/13/2007 | 09:30 PM ]

Performance in Flyby

High-End Graphics Cards

All the cards from the high-end category and two cards from the top-mainstream class cope with the task, providing an average frame rate of over 60fps.

The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, the most expensive product in this test, is in the lead at resolutions up to 1920x1200, but it is closely followed by the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB. The gap is about 5% at 1280x1024 and about 9% at 1600x1200. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB is in its turn only 1.5-2fps behind its elder brother – this difference is negligible considering that the average speeds are as high as 80-88fps. In other words, we can see it once again that the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB is meant for overclockers in the first place (if it is not pre-overclocked by the manufacturer). The same goes for the two versions of Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS that do not differ at all in this test. The final version of the game may have higher requirements to the amount of graphics memory, though, and the 320 megabytes of the junior model may prove not enough. We’ll check this out when Unreal Tournament 3 is released.

The picture is somewhat different for the resolution of 1920x1200: the GeForce 8800 GTX is an obvious leader now, outperforming the Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB by 12-13%. Both the cards easily provide an average frame rate of over 60fps, though. The results of the Radeon HD 2900 Pro are interesting, too. Being limited by the reduced core frequency, it is inferior to the GeForce 8800 GTS in low resolutions, but overtakes the latter at a resolution of 1920x1200 thanks to its advanced memory subsystem with a 512-bit bus.

We’ll keep our recommendations on the best graphics card for this game to ourselves until we see the final version of Unreal Tournament 3, but the demo shows a good tendency. If the final version is just as moderate in its system requirements, every modern graphics card from Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro to Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra is going to run it fast as is indicated by the results of the flyby tests.