High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Unreal Tournament 3

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes well even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign.

For our tests, we used the very latest game patch for Unreal Tournament 3, released after its ‘Titan’ pack. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys. Our tests were run at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values.

One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built in so we forced 4xAA in each vendor’s control panel. We record a demo in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game.

Here is Containment Demo at 1920×1200 with our HD 4870-X2:

And now with the GTX 280 at 1920×1200:

And now at 1680×1050 with our HD 4870-X2:

And finally at 1680×1050 with the GTX 280:

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our video cards with any CPU at our chosen resolutions except perhaps for the stock clocked AMD CPUs for the minimums.  We notice that both overclocking and the amount of cores do make a difference with the Unreal engine; there is good scaling from both overclocking and from tri- and quad-core CPUs.