Games Benchmarks - UT 2004 (DirectX)
The first game benchmark we'll look at is UT2004. 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 |
| X700 XT | 66.4 | 66.9 | 66.9 | 66.4 | 57.8 |
| X700 PRO | 65.5 | 66.3 | 66.0 | 64.8 | 49.4 |
| X800 XT | 67.2 | 67.1 | 67.0 | 67.2 | 66.7 |
| X600 XT | 67.4 | 67.6 | 61.4 | 44.8 | 32.2 |
| 9800 PRO | 81.2 | 78.6 | 73.1 | 71.0 | 50.3 |
| X700 XT % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 PRO | 1.4% | 0.8% | 1.3% | 2.5% | 16.9% |
| X800 XT | -1.2% | -0.3% | -0.2% | -1.2% | -13.4% |
| X600 XT | -1.5% | -1.0% | 9.0% | 48.1% | 79.3% |
| 9800 PRO | -18.2% | -14.9% | -8.5% | -6.5% | 14.9% |
| X700 PRO % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X800 XT | -2.5% | -1.1% | -1.5% | -3.5% | -25.9% |
| X600 XT | -2.8% | -1.8% | 7.6% | 44.6% | 53.3% |
| 9800 PRO | -19.3% | -15.6% | -9.7% | -8.8% | -1.7% |
As usual, UT2004 is displaying fairly large CPU limitations, with only the X600 XT showing much fill-rate bound performance limitations at 1024x768; the other boards are only really beginning to be limited at 1600x1200. At the highest resolution we can see the X700 XT is outperforming the 9800 PRO, with the X700 PRO very close to it – although 9800 PRO has a higher bandwidth, this may again be a case where the default texture properties of the X700’s are allowing to overcome the bandwidth difference, as UT2004 is a texture intensive title.
| Splinter Cell, 8x AF (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 XT | 66.9 | 66.3 | 64.4 | 52.8 | 33.9 |
| X700 PRO | 66.4 | 65.4 | 55.8 | 42.9 | 31.4 |
| X800 XT | 66.1 | 66.6 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 65.1 |
| X600 XT | 57.8 | 44.1 | 33.9 | 23.0 | 12.8 |
| 9800 PRO | 76.4 | 74.3 | 59.6 | 44.3 | 24.1 |
| X700 XT % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 PRO | 0.8% | 1.4% | 15.5% | 23.1% | 7.8% |
| X800 XT | 1.1% | -0.5% | -3.4% | -20.8% | -48.0% |
| X600 XT | 15.7% | 50.3% | 90.1% | 129.3% | 165.6% |
| 9800 PRO | -12.5% | -10.7% | 8.1% | 19.0% | 40.5% |
| X700 PRO % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X800 XT | 0.4% | -1.8% | -16.4% | -35.7% | -51.8% |
| X600 XT | 14.8% | 48.3% | 64.6% | 86.4% | 146.4% |
| 9800 PRO | -13.2% | -12.0% | -6.4% | -3.3% | 30.4% |
With both 4X FSAA and 8x AF enabled we see that the performance differences between the X700’s and 9800 PRO are very similar to the highest resolution under Normal rendering, with the X700 XT faster than the 9800 PRO and the 9800 PRO very close to X700 PRO’s performance. Again this is likely to be influenced by the texturing differences as adding 8x AF is going to further increase the texturing requirements, and this is despite FSAA being enabled which should favour the 9800 PRO as FSAA is usually fairly bandwidth intensive operation.
We can also see that the X700 PRO’s performance fill-rate is still rising from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200, whilst the X700 XT and 9800 PRO’s are tailing off a little – this is due to the fact that the X700 XT and the 9800 PRO only have 128MB of RAM and the X700 PRO has 256MB. At 1600x1200 the frame buffer requirements for 4x FSAA are too large for the local RAM to store at only 128MB, so some of the data is being addressed from the system memory rather than local RAM, and the bus bandwidth is lower than that of the local memory bandwidth. You’ll note that the 9800 PRO is dropping off in fill-rate performance more than that X700 XT is, and this is partially due to the fact that the X700 is on the PCI Express bus which has twice the bandwidth of the AGP bus the 9800 PRO is utilising, hence it harms performance less.
