Benchmarks - UT 2004 (DirectX)

The first game benchmark we'll look at is UT2004. Although UT2004 is relatively recently released, to our knowledge it is still largely based on a similar build of engine as UT2003, which means its feature set utilisation still marks it primarily as a DirectX7/8 engined title. We are using a custom Firing Squad benchmark demo.

Not unexpectedly, even with all the in-game settings at maximum detail, without FSAA or Anisotropic Filtering the performance of both of the X800’s are entirely CPU / system limited; even the 9800’s are for the most part. For this reason the relative performance differences between the boards are fairly slight.

Conversely to the normal rendering test, with 4X FSAA and 16X AF enabled in this UT2004 test the R300 based Radeon boards are showing a much greater fill-rate and bandwidth limitation. However, both the X800 boards are still showing themselves to be largely CPU limited with the X800 XT PE dropping just a few FPS at 1600x1200 and the X800 PRO dropping about 9 FPS. This being the case, the X800 XT PE shows as much as a 117% performance increase over the 9800 XT, and the X800 PRO an 84% increase.

The previous test showed that even with with 4X FSAA and 16X AF enabled there was very little performance variance, so its not unexpected that the individual settings show very little performance differences either. In virtually all cases the X800 XT PE is performing to nearly the maximum this CPU will allow for this particular test.

With the X800 PRO having either 4X FSAA or 16X AF show very little performance variance on their own, however when they are combined they do show some limitations – to the tune of a 16% performance drop at 1600x1200.