Budget Video Card Comparison - November 2000

Unreal Tournament Performance

Unlike the aforementioned games, Unreal Tournament does not take advantage of any T&L abilities. It is for this reason that we see almost no difference between the GeForce2 MX and the ATI Radeon SDR. The Voodoo4 4500, on the other hand, falls to the bottom of the pack, running about 27% slower than the other cards.

In Unreal Tournament, the Radeon SDR quickly rises to the top of the charts. Beating the GeForce2 MX by only 4 FPS, a speed difference that would not be noticed under gameplay. The reason for the Radeon SDR finishing on top is its HyperZ technology. Unreal Tournament is very memory intensive, due to the fact that the textures in the game are very large. By using HyperZ, the Radeon SDR is able to minimize the memory bottleneck present on the other cards.

At 1024x768x32, with the amount of information being passed over the memory bus increasing, the Radeon SDR is able to gain a larger lead of 15%. Both the GeForce2 MX and the ATI Radeon SDR perform at playable speeds, with the Voodoo4 4500 lying on the outskirts of this definition.

At 1280x1024x32, the results mimic those at 1024x768x32. In this case, the game is becoming too slow to play under some circumstances by our two top performing cards. The Voodoo4 4500's 16.5 FPS rating is too slow to be counted as playable.