THG's Secret Test Sauces Revealed
DirectX 8
Although the number of software titles that require DirectX 9 continue to grow, there are still some programs that work only with DirectX 8.
Unreal Tournament 2004
EPIC-Games and Atari brought Unreal Tournament 2004 on the market.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is a popular 3-D shooter that can be used to measure system and graphic performance.
| Software: | Unreal Tournament 2004 (EPIC Games, Atari) |
| Version: | Patch 3,204 |
| Installed size: | 5.6 G |
| Benchmark duration: | 1 Minute |
Installation
After installing the program, the newest patch should be loaded. Because we used our own time demo (thg8), we had to copy the relevant files to the folders Benchmark, Demos and System. Time demos for UT2004 are readily available on the Internet.
UT2004 can be switched into benchmark mode with the help of the following parameters:
| 'ut2004.exe -exitafterdemo -benchmark -exec=..\benchmark\stuff\thg8.txt -nosound -nogamma -d3d -1280x1024' |
The above parameters have to be added to the Unreal Tournament 2004 shortcut.
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Settings
We don't change the standard settings.
Benchmarking
Double clicking on the modified program shortcut runs one benchmark cycle. The results are always saved to a file called benchmark.log. This means that a batch file can be used to automatically run several benchmark cycles.
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.