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Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Demo: Top to Bottom GPU Analysis
Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Demo: Top to Bottom GPU Analysis
Date: October 18th, 2007
Topic: Video Card
Manufacturer: Various
Author: Derek Wilson
 
 

Introduction

We've already looked quite a bit at Unreal Tournament 3, but, as promised, here is our low end and mainstream GPU analysis of the beta version of the demo for Unreal Tournament 3. Certainly not a string of words that instills confidence in how well these numbers will represent final game play, but it's the best we've got right now for the best looking UE3 game to date.

Our first look at high end GPU performance showed that AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT was able to best NVIDIA's flagship hardware in a number of cases and remained very competitive even at high resolutions. Will this trend hold for the rest of the lineup, or is the 2900 XT just well suited to UT3?

We'll find out when we put our hardware to the test. First we will look at low end GPU, then the mainstream parts. Finally, we will bring it all together and look at performance across the board. Before we get to the numbers, here is the hardware we used for these numbers.

Test Setup
CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
Motherboard NVIDIA 680i SLI
Video Cards AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT
AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT
AMD Radeon HD 2600 Pro
AMD Radeon HD 2400 XT
AMD Radeon X1950 XTX
AMD Radeon X1950 Pro
AMD Radeon X1650 XT
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Video Drivers AMD: Catalyst 7.10
NVIDIA: 163.75
Hard Drive Seagate 7200.9 300GB 8MB 7200RPM
RAM 2x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit


Rather than run all three flybys as we did for the high end hardware, based on the fact that scaling was fairly consistent across maps, we decided only to test the most taxing of the maps: the Suspense CTF map. We will look a resolutions ranging from 800x600 up to 2560x1600. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Low End GPU Performance   Next Page

 
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34 Comments - Last by tfranzese, 840 days ago
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Exellent article by dm0r, 845 days ago
Very informative and with surprising results, great job as aways...
looks like the midrange fight is between the 8600GTS and 2600XT.The thing that most suprises me is the 2600XT beating 1950pro

Reply
2600XT = 8600GTS ? by MrKaz, 845 days ago
Why do you put the 2600XT in the same bag of the 8600GTS.
The price difference is huge.

I can buy one good 2600XT for 100€ and one good 8600GTS for 190€.

The more correct comparison is (I think)
19x0XT = 8600GTS
2600XT = 8600GT
2600PRO = 8500GT
2400PRO/XT = 8400GS


Reply
RE: 2600XT = 8600GTS ? by dm0r, 845 days ago
I compared in performance, not price...anyway looks like 2600xt is getting mature with new drivers.

I would like to see power consumption tests please

Reply
RE: 2600XT = 8600GTS ? by MrKaz, 845 days ago
Thanks for the reply ;)

But I was asking to the reviewer (Derek Wilson)

Reply
RE: 2600XT = 8600GTS ? by DerekWilson, 845 days ago
I did group cards by performance. Certainly, the 2600 performed quite well for its price. Which I hope was well noted in the article...

Reply
RE: 2600XT = 8600GTS ? by cmdrdredd, 844 days ago
power consumption is covered elsewhere. Game performance reviews/previews/guides are for PERFORMANCE based comparisons.

Reply
RE: 2600XT = 8600GTS ? by tfranzese, 840 days ago
Power consumption is one measure of performance just as frames per second is. There is no standard measure for performance and in this day and age, power consumption is becoming an even more important metric for deciding what the better performer is. I don't know anyone who loves excess heat and a high electric bill.

Reply
X1950 FTW by Ecmaster76, 845 days ago
I bet all those people who bought x1k cards are feeling pretty good right now. Once again, the radeon has shown in the long haul its superior longevity compared to the Geforce (assuming that future UT3 verions and drivers dont change the results significantly.

Reply
RE: X1950 FTW by ChronoReverse, 845 days ago
Yeah, I have an x1950 and I'm feeling pretty plucky indeed =D

Reply
RE: X1950 FTW by johnsonx, 844 days ago
I'm personally not too sure about my 1950Pro AGP. I don't seem to be getting such great performance.

My system specs out far better than my son's (me=X2@2.5Ghz, 1GB, X1950Pro AGP, Vista) (son=A64-3500, 2GB, 7900GS PCIe, XP Pro), yet he appears to get better performance in UT3. I haven't benchmarked it, but he has all detail levels turned up to max while I run mine with the details one tick above minimum, yet his seems smoother than mine.

Between my slightly faster dual core vs. his single core, and my more powerful video card, I ought to be able to run max detail (we both run 1280x1024 LCD's, which should be a walk in the park for my rig).

His system has only one thing better than mine, which is he has 2GB of ram while I have 1GB... but I haven't noted any swapping, and the game still loads pretty fast so it doesn't seem memory constrained.

I know there are many variables here (Vista vs XP, 1Gb vs 2Gb, AGP vs PCIe), but none of those AFAIK should make all that much difference today (obviously the Vista vs XP thing was a big deal 6 months ago, but the drivers have largely reached performance parity haven't they?). I guess I need to figure out how to run the benchmarks Derek did and see what's what.


Reply
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