Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3)

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. 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 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1200 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. We forced 4xAA for 2560×1600 and 8xAA for 1920×1200 in each vendor’s control panel; 8xQ for Nvidia to match AMD Graphics’ 8xMSAA settings. 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, first at 2560×1600 with 4xAA forced in each vendor’s control panel:

Only the HD 4870 falls below the 30 FPS barrier that some consider a minimum for first person shooters.  The GTX 580 is the fastest although the HD 6970 beats the GTX 480 and the HTX 570.  Now we test at 1920 x 1200 and with 8xAA (8xQ in Nvidia’s Control Panel) forced:

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed-out with any of our graphics configurations except for the 768MB GTX 460 when 8xQ is forced in the control panel. The HD 5870 catches and passes even the GTX 480 at 1920×1200 although the GTX 580 puts in the best showing at 2560×1600 and the GTX 570 and the GTX 480 trade blows with each other in a pretty even match up with the HD 5870 hanging tough.  However, at 1920×1200 the HD 6970 puts in its first win overall over the GTX 580 and the rest of the pack