3dfx Voodoo4 4500AGP

In UnrealTournament, the Minimum Frame Rate at 640 x 480 is mostly CPU limited for the contenders here since the game doesn't take advantage of any of the competing hardware T&L engines.

Without the inclusion of the Voodoo4 4500 there's a 10% spread of frame rates, however including the Voodoo4 increases that spread to 20% which is an indication of the performance to come...

Once again, in the average frame rate score at 640 x 480 x 32, the Voodoo4 4500 falls noticeably behind the competition. Outside of the Voodoo4, the slowest card here is only 5% slower than the fastest Voodoo5 5500. But if you look at the Voodoo4 4500 you're looking at a performance hit of over 20% when compared to the next to last contender.

This is still only at 640 x 480 x 32, and while 76 fps is definitely a playable frame rate let's see how bad things get as the resolution increases...

The Voodoo4 4500 really suffers under the worst case scenario here.

While we've historically knocked UT for being a bad benchmark, combined with a solid demo we can really get quite a bit of information out of it. Case in point being the performance of the Voodoo4 4500 under the worst possible conditions, and as you can see the GeForce2 MX is no less than twice as fast as the Voodoo4 here.

The Radeon SDR benefits from its HyperZ technology and pulls even further ahead of the Voodoo4, surpassing the GeForce2 MX in performance and ends up only 6% slower than the Voodoo5 5500.

UnrealTournament, being a very texture hungry game, makes very good use of the Radeon's efficient memory bandwidth management techniques (HyperZ) and allows it to perform virtually on par with the Voodoo5 5500.

The GeForce2 MX suffers a bit because of its memory bandwidth limitations, but the Voodoo4 4500, with the same amount of memory bandwidth as the GeForce2 MX but with not nearly as high of a fill rate comes in around 56% slower once again.

UnrealTournament is actually pretty well behaved at higher resolutions. While it has a problem with a lot of our cards running at 1600 x 1200 x 32, thus forcing us to run the benchmark at 1600 x 1200 x 16, the fact that there is no real performance difference between the two settings (performance-wise) in UT helps us use these scores to continue our analysis.

The minimum frame rates are much closer as the GeForce2 MX and Radeon SDR are crippled by memory bandwidth limitations here. Percentage-wise, the Radeon SDR is still 55% faster, and the GeForce2 MX isn't too far behind however when you look at the frame rates they're all pretty bad. So let's take a look at how the averages are doing...

While 1600 x 1200 x 16 may bring all of our competing cards to their knees, when they are allowed to shine they really do. The Radeon SDR truly knows how to manage its memory bandwidth as it performs dangerously close to its DDR brothers while extending a 74% lead over the Voodoo4 4500. The GeForce2 MX is much closer to the Voodoo4's performance with only a 33% lead.