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

Unreal Performance Test 2002 (Build 848) 1024 x 768 x 32 (Performance in fps - Higher is better) ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 ST Micro Kyro II NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon DDR NVIDIA GeForce DDR ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 NVIDIA GeForce 256 NVIDIA GeForce2 MX NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 200 51.7 48.6 41.0 36.0 28.6 25.7 25.2 24.2 21.1 15.9 15.6 13.6 12.6 12.4 6.8 | 0 | 10 | 21 | 31 | 41 | 52 | 62

By far the most popular resolution, 1024 x 768, creates an even more interesting situation. Now instead of the Radeon 8500 and GeForce3 Ti 500 increasing their performance gap, it is closing. The two are now separated by only 6% as additional limitations are thrown into the mix with 64% more pixels to be rendered on the screen.

The Kyro II is also just as fast as the GeForce2 Ti 200 now, again courtesy of the extremely fast host CPU. In future articles we will investigate exactly what speed CPU the Kyro II needs in order to remain competitive with these hardware T&L equipped solutions from ATI and NVIDIA.

The one abnormality is that regardless of how many times we ran the benchmark, the Radeon 7500 always dropped significantly in performance. As you'll see from the next chart, the abnormality is only limited to this resolution so it is most likely a quirk with the drivers.

If we set 30 fps as our minimum requirement for playability, everything slower than the GeForce3 Ti 200 fails to make the cut. It's time to squeeze some more performance out of drivers.