NVIDIA Puts Its (New) Cards on the Table

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT 2003 is a very popular first person shooter of the last generation of games. Basically, you could say it's a DirectX 7 game spiced up with some DirectX 8 features. In some cases, like terrain rendering, the engine already uses pixel shaders v1.1 or v1.4, depending on hardware support. The "Unreal Engine" is under constant development, always being improved and tweaked. Over the last few years, several games using various versions of this engine have been published - see wiki.beyondunreal.com for more info.

We ran this benchmark using the highest detail settings available to put as much strain on the graphics cards as possible. Instead of using the flyby demos integrated into the game, we recorded our own demos using the maps "Inferno" and "Magma". Interestingly, as the results will show, these two maps confront the graphics cards with completely different requirements.

The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is about on par with the Radeon 9800 Pro. The Radeon 9800 XT is still a tad faster than the Pro (about 6%). The FX 5700 Ultra turns in scores similar to those of the Radeon 9600 Pro/XT.