NVIDIA's nForce2 Part II: Diving Deeper

IGP Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003

We've been using Unreal Tournament 2003 (the engine at least) for nine months now, but we're finally able to switch to the final demo and retail releases of the game for our benchmarks. In this test we're still using the demo version of the game but you have to change a couple of things in order to produce comparable numbers between different graphics cards.

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:\UT2003Demo\Benchmark\ directory.

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

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

Remember to do this to all of the 7 .bat files in that directory before running Benchmark.exe.

Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Flyby 1024x768x32 - High Quality Settings NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 ATI Radeon 9000 Pro NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DualDDR 400) NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DualDDR 333) NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DDR400) NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DDR333) 85.5 84.6 61.6 55.5 41.6 40.6 35.5 | 0 | 17 | 34 | 51 | 68 | 86 | 103

With only a single channel of DDR SDRAM, the performance of the nForce2 IGP hovers around the GeForce4 MX 420. Going to DualDDR helps tremendously but still not enough to match the GeForce4 MX 440.

Gaming Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Botmatch 1024x768x32 - High Quality Settings NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 ATI Radeon 9000 Pro NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DualDDR 400) NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DualDDR 333) NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DDR400) NVIDIA nForce2 IGP (DDR333) 54.7 52.3 38.1 33.8 27.2 25.5 21.8 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 | 66

We see much of the same picture in the Botmatch performance comparison, there's still not enough memory bandwidth to compete with the Radeon 9000 Pro or GeForce4 MX 440.