Next-Generation Game Performance with the Unreal Engine: 15-way GPU Shootout

Project: GPU Benchmark

First and foremost, it should be mentioned that this will be an evolving project. Epic's next-generation game engine is constantly evolving and so will this series of articles. We will provide follow-ups if/when Epic introduces new features to their engine that introduce new performance challenges, as well as if manufacturers release new drivers that are further optimized for these new features that we're testing. We'll also entertain reader requests, as always, for other avenues to continue this investigation. Our primary goal is to provide you with the most accurate and thorough information possible, and thus with enough demand (and time permitting), we will explore other performance questions that can be answered through the use of this benchmark.

The current state of the benchmark is that it is built off of build 848 of the Unreal Engine. Although the engine currently doesn't take advantage of any custom pixel/vertex shader programs it is considerably more GPU limited than any previous test we've run.

To give you an idea of the complexity of the engine and the benchmark, we asked two of Epic's finest, Daniel Vogel and Tim Sweeney to give us a brief overview of the Unreal Performance Test 2002:

"The Unreal Performance Test 2002 currently consists of a flyby through an outdoor terrain map with as many as 100,000 triangles. Due to the nature of the flyby and extended visibility in outdoor areas the flyby is quite memory bandwidth intensive on the GPU. To achieve a realistic CPU load 14 bots walking around pseudo-randomly have been added to the map.

For statistics gathering 2510 frames are rendered as fast as possible at a locked game framerate of 30 fps with the first 10 frames being disregarded."

To put things into perspective, the average polygon counts range from 50 - 100 times that of Unreal Tournament. We were also told that texture usage has increased approximately 8 fold as well. Courtesy of DXT texture compression, the overall memory bandwidth usage has only gone up by a quarter of that.

The benchmark is not a synthetic test, rather it's designed to simulate performance on the latest builds of the Unreal Engine. This is not your average flyby, it has sharp turns simulating what every hardcore first person shooter player will be doing and has a number of other features to give you a real flavor of a game benchmark.

The benchmark is not publicly available and we have received it courtesy of Epic Games, we cannot redistribute it.