Next-Generation Game Performance with the Unreal Engine: 15-way GPU Shootout

Unreal Performance Test 2002 (Build 848) 640 x 480 x 32 (Performance in fps - Higher is better) ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon DDR ST Micro Kyro II NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 NVIDIA GeForce DDR NVIDIA GeForce2 MX NVIDIA GeForce 256 NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 200 80.5 78.9 66.7 64.3 57.1 53.0 49.2 44.4 40.5 39.1 28.3 28.3 26.4 24.2 13.0 | 0 | 16 | 32 | 48 | 64 | 81 | 97

If you look at a performance comparison chart at 640 x 480 in most of today's games, everything above the GeForce2 Pro will pretty much perform about the same; that's clearly not the case here.

The card that had potential actually ends up coming out on top here as the Radeon 8500 managed to slightly edge out the GeForce3 Ti 500. We did run into a problem with the Radeon 8500 and that was a flickering fog issue which ATI is aware of. This should be fixed via a driver update.

Next we see that the Radeon 7500 does a lot better than it has done in most of today's games as it comes within 4% of the GeForce3. We can also derive from this that early adopters of the GeForce3, although they spent quite a bit, are still among the top three performers in this benchmark.

There's also not much difference between the GeForce2 Ultra and the GeForce3 Ti 200 because of the fact that the GeForce2 Ultra has a much higher GPU clock than the GeForce3 Ti 200. The main advantages the Ti 200 offers here are the improved memory controller as well as the programmable pixel and vertex shader support.

Although this is supposed to be a GPU shootout we included the Kyro II which, as you should be aware of, does not have any hardware T&L capabilities and thus relies on the host CPU for all triangle setup and vertex processing. When paired with a fast CPU like the Athlon XP 2000+ the Kyro II actually outperforms all of the lower end cards and comes dangerously close to ATI's original Radeon. With a fast CPU it seems like the Kyro II could be quite the low-end competitor, but remember we're only looking at 640 x 480 - let's crank up the resolution a bit and see what happens.