Benchmark Results: Crysis And Unreal Tournament 3
3D Games: Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3
We see how GPU limited we have been with Crysis at very high details, as this month's stock PC manages to outperform last month’s overclocked machine.
By overclocking the Radeon HD 4870 and E5200, we are finally approaching playable frame rates at our lowest resolution.
Adding even more demands to the GPU by enabling 4x anti-aliasing (AA), this month's PC stretches its lead and reaches 30 frames per second (FPS) at low resolution, which is about the same FPS rate we saw last month without AA.
As always, we run a few more realistic settings for Crysis to better highlight a Crysis gaming experience at this budget. At medium details, we are CPU limited and last month’s system wins at every resolution at stock clock speeds. At high details, we see a shift from CPU limitation to GPU limitation, but December’s system loses 13 FPS at 1920x1200, while the January PC only takes a 6 FPS hit. Overclocked, the January/February system manages a 5-7 FPS lead at each resolution, averaging 42 FPS at 1680x1050.
Things are clearly CPU limited in UT3 and this month’s system fails to surpass the performance seen last month. Of course, both systems are easily playable at all resolutions.
We still see very playable performance with AA and anisotropic filtering (AF) forced in the drivers, but notice how at stock speeds we don’t seem to have the CPU power to space the two systems apart. Overclocking removes this CPU limitation, and as the resolution is raised, there is a far larger drop in frame rates with the HD 4850 last month than with the current build’s HD 4870.
