Games Benchmarks - DirectX


UT2004

The first game benchmark we'll look at is UT2004. To our knowledge UT2004 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.

UT2004 (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX 74.2 73.9 73.8 74.0 73.9
6800 Ultra 75.1 75.4 75.2 75.4 75.6
7800 GTX SLI 72.7 73.0 72.8 73.4 73.1
6800 Ultra SLI 73.5 73.9 74.0 73.6 73.8
7800 GTX % Faster than 6800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
Single -1.2% -2.1% -1.8% -1.9% -2.3%
SLI -1.0% -1.2% -1.6% -0.2% -1.0%
% SLI Increase 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX -2.0% -1.2% -1.4% -0.8% -1.1%
6800 Ultra -2.2% -2.1% -1.5% -2.4% -2.5%

There's not a great deal to say here. UT2004 has proven itself to be highly CPU bound without any extra image quality feature enabled on many high end graphics card now and that is naturally not going to be an exception for GeForce 7800 GTX. The CPU limitation is also carrying over to the boards in SLI mode and the extra CPU overhead for the graphics board data synchronisation is causing a smaller performance degradation.

UT2004, 4x FSAA & 8x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX 73.7 73.8 73.8 73.7 73.6
6800 Ultra 75.0 75.6 75.2 74.5 63.4
7800 GTX SLI 73.1 72.8 72.4 72.4 72.1
6800 Ultra SLI 74.1 73.9 73.8 74.1 73.2
7800 GTX % Faster than 6800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
Single -1.7% -2.4% -1.9% -1.0% 16.1%
SLI -1.3% -1.4% -1.9% -2.3% -1.6%
% SLI Increase 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX -0.8% -1.3% -1.8% -1.8% -2.1%
6800 Ultra -1.2% -2.3% -1.9% -0.5% 15.6%

Even with 4x FSAA and 8x AF (Anisotropic Filtering) enabled only the single 6800 Ultra is beginning to show even the slightly fill-rate / bandwidth limitation, but the 7800 GTX has more than enough resources to still see a CPU limitation at this point.

UT2004, 8xS FSAA & 16x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX 72.7 73.7 73.5 70.6 51.1
6800 Ultra 73.6 74.8 67.1 49.6 29.4
7800 GTX SLI 71.5 72.8 73.1 72.4 72.1
6800 Ultra SLI 71.4 72.3 72.6 72.4 54.4
7800 GTX % Faster than 6800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
Single -1.2% -1.5% 9.6% 42.1% 73.7%
SLI 0.2% 0.7% 0.7% 0.1% 32.5%
% SLI Increase 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
7800 GTX -1.6% -1.1% -0.5% 2.7% 40.9%
6800 Ultra -3.0% -3.4% 8.3% 45.8% 84.7%

With 8xS FSAA (which requires twice the sampling all the pixel information) and 16x AF enabled the performance are starting to become much more graphics bound, to the point were the 7800 GTX has a 74% advantage over a 6800 Ultra and in SLI still has a 33% performance advantage at high resolution. In this instance we can see that a single 7800 GTX is only a few FPS behind the 6800 Ultra's in SLI mode. The 7800 GTX's in SLI mode are still CPU limited under these rendering conditions, and as such it has a lower gain in relation to its single board mode than the 6800 Ultra's do.