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. Given the performances we've seen historically with this title, and its CPU limited nature on high end benchmarks, we'll go straight to rendering with 4x FSAA & 8x Anisotropic Filtering (AF).

UT2004, 4x AA & 8x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 86.3 88.5 88.5 88.2 88.2
7800 GTX 256MB 86.5 88.4 88.5 88.5 87.5
6800 Ultra 256MB 86.9 88.8 88.7 78.8 61.1
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB -0.3% 0.1% 0.0% -0.4% 0.8%
6800 Ultra 256MB -0.7% -0.3% -0.3% 11.8% 44.4%

Even with 4x FSAA and 8x AF neither of the 7800 GTX's are showing anything in the way of graphics limitation under this test, instead they are both CPU bound on this system. Only the 6800 Ultra gets limited at higher resolutions, so both the 7800's are over 40% faster at 1600x1200.

Where possible, we'll also take a look at the performance with the highest IQ options available to the 7800, which means 16x Anisotropic Filtering and 8xS FSAA with SuperSampling Transparency AA (TrAA) enabled.

UT2004, 8xS TrAA & 16x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 87.8 87.8 87.5 85.6 64.6
7800 GTX 256MB 88.2 87.8 87.5 76.3 54.4
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB -0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 12.2% 18.7%

The performance between the two boards are similar at lower resolution, but past 1280x1024 a performance gap opens, scaling up to a 19% performance advantage to the newer GTX 512MB board at 1600x1200 thanks to its higher core clockspeeds and greater bandwidth.