Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Demo: Top to Bottom GPU Analysis

Introduction

We've already looked quite a bit at Unreal Tournament 3, but, as promised, here is our low end and mainstream GPU analysis of the beta version of the demo for Unreal Tournament 3. Certainly not a string of words that instills confidence in how well these numbers will represent final game play, but it's the best we've got right now for the best looking UE3 game to date.

Our first look at high end GPU performance showed that AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT was able to best NVIDIA's flagship hardware in a number of cases and remained very competitive even at high resolutions. Will this trend hold for the rest of the lineup, or is the 2900 XT just well suited to UT3?

We'll find out when we put our hardware to the test. First we will look at low end GPU, then the mainstream parts. Finally, we will bring it all together and look at performance across the board. Before we get to the numbers, here is the hardware we used for these numbers.

Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
Motherboard	NVIDIA 680i SLI
Video Cards	AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT AMD Radeon HD 2600 Pro AMD Radeon HD 2400 XT AMD Radeon X1950 XTX AMD Radeon X1950 Pro AMD Radeon X1650 XT NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Video Drivers	AMD: Catalyst 7.10 NVIDIA: 163.75
Hard Drive	Seagate 7200.9 300GB 8MB 7200RPM
RAM	2x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

Rather than run all three flybys as we did for the high end hardware, based on the fact that scaling was fairly consistent across maps, we decided only to test the most taxing of the maps: the Suspense CTF map. We will look a resolutions ranging from 800x600 up to 2560x1600. Sit back and enjoy the ride.