Introducing AMD’s “Turks” – HD 6670 and HD 6570

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 1920×1200 with 8xAA forced in each vendor’s control panel:

At this resolution and maxed out AA, the GTS 450 is  much faster than the HD 6670. Now we test at 1680 x 1080 and with 4xAA forced.

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed-out with any of our graphics configurations except for the GT 430. The HD 6670 nearly catches the GTS 450 while the HD 6790 beats the GTX 550 Ti and HD 5770 at its target resolution. The GTX 460 stands out for its price. The HD 5770 just edges the overclocked GTX 550Ti in the averages at 1920×1200 although the GeForce beats the Radeon in the minimums.