VIA Responds with KT400A, Five Months Later
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 10, 2003 12:19 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 (Flyby)
With this review we continue to use the final retail version of Unreal Tournament 2003 as a benchmark tool. The benchmark works similarly to the demo, except there are higher detail settings that can be chosen. As we've mentioned before, in order to make sure that all numbers are comparable you need to be sure to do the following:
By default the game will detect your video card and assign its internal defaults based on the capabilities of your video card to optimize the game for performance. In order to fairly compare different video cards you have to tell the engine to always use the same set of defaults which is accomplished by editing the .bat files in the X:\UT2003\Benchmark\ directory.
Add the following parameters to the statements in every one of the .bat files located in that directory:
-ini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetail.ini -userini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetailUser.ini
For example, in botmatch-antalus.bat will look like this after the additions:
..\System\ut2003 dm-antalus?spectatoronly=true?numbots=12?quickstart=true -benchmark -seconds=77 -exec=..\Benchmark\Stuff\botmatchexec.txt -ini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetail.ini -userini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetailUser.ini -nosound
Remember to do this to all of the .bat files in that directory before running Benchmark.exe.
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214.9
206.8The retail nForce2 board holds a 4% performance advantage over the KT400A reference board here. Assuming that the final shipping versions of the KT400A are actually of higher performance, this isn't a bad showing for VIA. Even if performance doesn't change, a 4% differential is not noticeable in real world usage scenarios, so for all means and purposes the two are equal performers.
An extremely dated benchmark, Quake III Arena has become much more of a CPU and platform test than anything because of the fact that current generation graphics cards are no where near stressed by it. We used our old 1.29f build of the game with the classic demo "four" at High Quality defaults, with everything maxed out at 1024x768.
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Another 3% advantage for the nForce2, the KT400A continues to remain on the heels of the mature nForce2.
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The gap remains just under 3% under Jedi Knight II, once again, not a bad showing from VIA.
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For our final gaming test, the KT400A comes within 1.5% of the nForce2 - using only a single 64-bit memory controller.
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