ATI Mobility Radeon 9000: Raising the bar again

Unreal Tournament 2003

We recently switched to a newer build of Unreal Tournament 2003 (created on 8/6/02). This benchmark should give you a good idea of how a system will perform in a number of Unreal Tournament 2003 levels. We chose to run our benchmarks at three resolutions (800x600, 1024x786, and 1280x1024) because these are the resolutions at which most mobile gamers will play current and upcoming titles.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-antalus @ 800x600x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 70.5 63.2 | 0 | 14 | 28 | 42 | 56 | 71 | 85

Antalus, an outdoor level in Unreal Tournament 2003, is one of the more stressful levels that the game has to offer. Already at 800x600x32 with high detail settings enabled, we see that the Mobility Radeon 9000 is able to provide a noticeable performance lead over the GeForce4 440 Go. Here the Mobility Radeon 9000 performed 12% faster than the fastest performing NVIDIA mobile part.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-antalus @ 1024x768x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 46.6 43.3 | 0 | 9 | 19 | 28 | 37 | 47 | 56

As we bump the resolution up, the performance advantage offered by the Mobility Radeon 9000 shrinks to 8%.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-antalus @ 1280x1024x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 30.3 28.4 | 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 | 36

Here the performance advantage of the Mobility Radeon 9000 drops to just 7%. Is this a trend that will continue or a specific situation where the Mobility Radeon 9000 is not able to perform at its best?

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-asbestos @ 800x600x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 131.7 103.3 | 0 | 26 | 53 | 79 | 105 | 132 | 158

Well, switching levels answered that question fairly quickly. Although in the Antalus demo the maximum performance increase offered by the Mobility Radeon 9000 was 12%, in the Asbestos level at 800x600x32 we already see the Mobility Radeon 9000 outdoing the GeForce4 440 Go by 27%. It seems that the Antalus demo does not show off the Mobility Radeon 9000's strongest points, likely due to the way that the level is rendered.

It is interesting to note that on the high-end desktop side we usually find the Asbestos demo to be fairly CPU bound especially at a low resolution like 800x600x32. Clearly the GeForce4 440 Go does not give the system enough video processing power to allow the CPU to become the bottleneck.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-asbestos @ 1024x768x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 93.0 74.6 | 0 | 19 | 37 | 56 | 74 | 93 | 112

At 1024x768x32 the Mobility Radeon 9000 excels again. Here the chip outperformed the GeForce4 440 Go by a noticeable 25%.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-asbestos @ 1280x1024x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 60.7 48.5 | 0 | 12 | 24 | 36 | 49 | 61 | 73

Finally, at 1280x1024x32, we see that the Mobility Radeon 9000 is able to keep up the trend. The Mobility Radeon 9000 runs 25% faster than the GeForce4 440 Go not only in this resolution but on average throughout the whole Asbestos demo.