Unreal Tournament 2003

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.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Flyby
800x600 - Maximum Detail
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440

208.9

189.9

183.8

122.4

112.9

106.5

|
0
|
42
|
84
|
125
|
167
|
209
|
251

Starting out, we see some interesting things; the FX 5600 Ultra is right on the heels of the GeForce4 Ti 4200, but unable to outperform it. Remember that the 5600 Ultra has a lower fill rate, but more (and more efficient) memory bandwidth. At this low of a resolution, memory bandwidth isn't the limiting factor, thus the Ti 4200 comes out on top.

The 5200 Ultra manages to outperform its competition fairly well, although it will be interesting to see where the regular 5200 would fall into this chart.

You can also see a clear division between the 5600 Ultra and the 5200 Ultra, although the two cores may be similar, they are clearly not on equal performance levels.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Flyby
1024x768 - Maximum Detail
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440

163.4

135.9

133.8

81.1

74.3

72.1

|
0
|
33
|
65
|
98
|
131
|
163
|
196

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Flyby
1280x960 - Maximum Detail
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440

ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

112.6

91.5

90.5

54.5

48.2

47.4

|
0
|
23
|
45
|
68
|
90
|
113
|
135

Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail - Flyby
1600x1200 - Maximum Detail
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440

73.4

61.1

59.5

36.2

33.9

32.4

|
0
|
15
|
29
|
44
|
59
|
73
|
9

The trend continues all the way up to 1600x1200, where the FX 5600 Ultra is finally able to outperform the Ti 4200, once again because of being more memory bandwidth dependent at this high of a resolution.

What's interesting to note is that the Radeon 9500 Pro does incredibly well in all of these tests, if ATI is able to make the Radeon 9600 Pro perform just as well as the 9500 Pro then NVIDIA could be in trouble. But considering that the Radeon 9500 Pro has twice as many pipelines as the Radeon 9600 Pro, it is unlikely that we will see that sort of a showing from the 9600 core.

The Test Unreal Tournament 2003 (AA & Anisotropic Performance)
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