ATI’s Radeon 9700 (R300) – Crowning the New King

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus)

We used the same build of Unreal Tournament 2003 as we used in our recent GPU shootout, be sure to read that story for more information on the demo and the levels we benchmarked. As a quick refresher, DM-Antalus is a mostly outdoor level that makes decent use of quad texturing.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus) 1024x768x32 High Detail Settings Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.38 1.00 0.66 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2

Right off the bat we know that this thing has power, at 1024x768 in the most stressful UT2003 test we can throw at it the Radeon 9700 is already 38% faster than the GeForce4 Ti 4600.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus) 1280x1024x32 High Detail Settings Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.48 1.00 0.59 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2

Crank the resolution up to 1280x1024 and the Radeon 9700 is now 48% faster than the GeForce4 Ti 4600, no driver release in the world could get rid of that performance gap.

Unreal Tournament 2003 (DM-Antalus) 1600x1200x32 High Detail Settings Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.54 1.00 0.60 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2

Finally, at 1600x1200 the Radeon 9700 can play Unreal Tournament 2003 at the highest detail settings just fine; the R300 manages to outperform the fastest GeForce4 by an incredible 54%.