Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003

With this review we continue to use the final retail version of Unreal Tournament 2003 as a benchmark tool. The benchmark works similarly to the demo, except there are higher detail settings that can be chosen. As we've mentioned before, in order to make sure that all numbers are comparable you need to be sure to do the following:

By default the game will detect your video card and assign its internal defaults based on the capabilities of your video card to optimize the game for performance. In order to fairly compare different video cards you have to tell the engine to always use the same set of defaults which is accomplished by editing the .bat files in the X:\UT2003\Benchmark\ directory.

Add the following parameters to the statements in every one of the .bat files located in that directory:

-ini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetail.ini -userini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetailUser.ini

For example, in botmatch-antalus.bat will look like this after the additions:

..\System\ut2003 dm-antalus?spectatoronly=true?numbots=12?quickstart=true -benchmark -seconds=77 -exec=..\Benchmark\Stuff\botmatchexec.txt -ini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetail.ini -userini=..\\Benchmark\\Stuff\\MaxDetailUser.ini -nosound

Remember to do this to all of the .bat files in that directory before running Benchmark.exe.

Gaming Performance
Unreal Tournament 2003 - Flyby Benchmark - 1024x768 Maximum Detail
Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz

Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz)

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB)

Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB)

198.5

194.2

191.3

182.0

178.4

170.2

165.0

158.5

150.9

148.2

137.4

|
0
|
40
|
79
|
119
|
159
|
199
|
238

The Flyby benchmark is a test of how well the CPU can feed polygon data to the GPU; once again we're dealing with a single-threaded application so there's no performance gains to be had from enabling Hyper-Threading. The 3.06GHz Pentium 4 and Athlon XP 2800+ are dangerously close to one another at the top of the chart, but let's take a look at a more CPU bound test:

Gaming Performance
Unreal Tournament 2003 - Botmatch Benchmark - 1024x768 Maximum Detail
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz)

Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz)

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB)

Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB)

78.5

74.0

70.0

69.1

65.1

63.2

60.2

59.9

57.1

51.5

47.6

|
0
|
16
|
31
|
47
|
63
|
79
|
94

Generally speaking the UT2003 Flyby benchmark is more of a graphics test since it doesn't really stress what the CPU is doing while you're playing a game; instead we have the Botmatch benchmark that focuses mostly on the physics & artificial intelligence calculations that go on while your GPU is making frames fly.

Here we see that AMD actually takes the lead with their XP 2800+, although the 6% lead can be negligible it's interesting to note that both processor families are closely matched in this test.

Just for comparison purposes (since we know a lot of you run 3DMark), here are the processor standings in 3DMark 2001 SE:

Gaming Performance
3DMark 2001 SE - 1024x768
Intel Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz

Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz)

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz)

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz FSB)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)

Intel Pentium 4 1.8AGHz (400MHz FSB)

15462

15089

14694

14574

13812

13614

12740

12407

12262

11921

11530

|
0
|
3092
|
6185
|
9277
|
12370
|
15462
|
18554

Archiving Performance Gaming Performance (continued)
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