GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 Part II: CPU Scaling

ATI’s Radeon Line

The following GPUs are featured in the charts below:

Radeon 8500
Radeon 8500LE
Radeon 7500

The Radeon 8500 offers GeForce3-class performance under UT2003 and as you can see from the graph above, it scales with CPU speed almost identically. 

After 1.2GHz the 8500’s CPU scaling curve pretty much flattens out, and it’s after that point that buying a faster CPU will not result in a tangible increase in GPU performance.

As we drop down to Medium Detail settings you’ll notice that at lower clock speeds (those below 1.2GHz), the Radeon 8500 performs identically to the Radeon 7500.  Granted that this doesn’t take into account feature benefits the Radeon 8500 series has over the 7500 but from purely a performance standpoint, Radeon 7500 owners need not think of upgrading their graphics to an 8500 before moving to a faster CPU. 

It’s almost immediately once you pass the 1.2GHz mark that the two Radeon 8500 cards can begin to separate themselves from the 7500 by a reasonable margin.