AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.1GHz

UnrealTournament scales quite nicely with CPU speed which makes it the perfect benchmark in a CPU review. On identical platforms (VIA KT133 vs 133A - they use the same memory/AGP controllers), the 1.1GHz Thunderbird is just barely slower (0.2 fps) than the 1.13GHz Pentium III.

The breakdown of performance is pretty similar to what we've seen before. The Duron, clock for clock is about 3% slower than a K75 Athlon and at 1GHz, the Thunderbird offers a 11.4% improvement over the original Athlon that broke the GHz barrier.

Unlike what we noticed under Quake III Arena, UnrealTournament doesn't seem to be choking the test GeForce2 GTS card at 1024 x 768 x 32. Instead the performance drop between 640 x 480 and this higher resolution is minimal, a faster CPU still seems to yield greater performance.