GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches
Unreal Tournament3
Unreal Tournament3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series and the eighth Unreal game, but it has been named in relation to the engine it runs on. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. It was released for Windows on November, 2007. While many games share the same Unreal3 engine, the developers can decide how high the system requirements will be by increasing the level of detail. Unreal Tournament3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes 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 that includes team members with their own personalities. UT3’s vehicles have been split into two factions, the Axon vehicles and Necris vehicles – and every player is also equipped with a personal hoverboard.
For our tests, we used the latest game patch for Unreal Tournament3. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, however, so we used FRAPS as well as HardwareOC’s benchmark tool which does 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 the UT3’s in-game graphical 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. While video card vendors like have found ways to force this in their drivers control panel, we did not force it. Again, we use the “timedemo-style” of benchmark for UT3. A “demo” is recorded 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 the it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game.
Containment Demo
Nice results from all video cards and UT3 is completely playable at 19×12. CrossfireX-3 scaling is no good which is probably due to UT3 being CPU-bound, lack of AA, and ATi crossfire driver immaturity.
