Introducing the GTX 570 – the GTX 480’s Performance at $349
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: Now 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.
Amazing GPU! now I wish I didn’t get a GTX 480
Oh well, this one will keep me satisfied till 2013 at least.
This is another kick-ass review.. 23 games covered with practical settings/resolutions that an enthusiast gamer would choose with the card is by far the biggest number of games covered in a benchmark review. It is so far ahead of the next hardware review website, that comes up at 2nd place with 16 games. That’s why I love AlienBabelTech!!
plz ABT do a gtx 570 sli review plz.
Thank-you.
I’d love to do a GTX 570 SLI review. It will depend on getting another GTX 570 for review. I am scheduled to do a CrossFire-X review versus SLI for early next year. So far, GTS 450, GTX 460 and GTS 480 will represent SLI and we will have HD 5780 and HD 6000 series.
Rubbish review….don’t bench OC’d cards vs stock ones, the stock ones can be OC’d as well. I know my GTX 480 hits over 900 core which nets me about 20% in most benchmarks….stock vs stock or max oc vs max oc, not stock vs oc as that is stupid.
ALL of the cards are all benched at stocked versus stock speeds. In this case – beside the stock GTX 570 – the overclocked GTX 570 is included as an ‘extra’ to show its framerate scaling with increased clockspeeds since this particular review is all about the GTX 570. In earlier evaluations we covered overclocking the GTX 480 and in each review we overclock our target card in addition to showing it at its stock clocks.