GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 Part II: CPU Scaling

Final Words

We refrained from putting all of the cards in a single chart because it ends up being cluttered and you don’t get a good idea for how each individual GPU scales but now that you’ve been through the entire roundup we can leave you with a couple of helpful abridged charts:

In the end, the results are pretty much as you’d expect; it is the fastest GPUs that truly require very fast CPUs in order to feed them vertex data at a rate that can maintain their high performance levels.

What’s also interesting to note is that if you extrapolate based on this data then you’ll see that the forthcoming generation of GPUs will need even more powerful processors than an Athlon XP 2100+ in order to get the most out of their performance.  With AMD slowly ramping the clock speed of the Athlon XP line between now and Hammer’s release, it looks like we’ll be testing R300 and NV30 on Pentium 4 systems.