ATI Mobility Radeon 9000: Raising the bar again

Unreal Tournament 2003 (continued)

The ctf-citadel demo is a capture the flag gameplay benchmark set in the Citadel level.

Unreal Tournament 2003 ctf-citadel @ 800x600x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 85.2 81.5 | 0 | 17 | 34 | 51 | 68 | 85 | 102

The Mobility Radeon 9000 only outperforms the GeForce4 440 Go by 5% at 800x600x32 in the Citadel level. The reason: the benchmark is fairly well CPU limited at this resolution.

Unreal Tournament 2003 ctf-citadel @ 1024x768x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 65.9 61.0 | 0 | 13 | 26 | 40 | 53 | 66 | 8

Cranking the resolution up gives us a bit more performance improvement, 8% as opposed to 5%, but we still would have liked to see more. Again, we can hypothesize that the one texture per pipeline or perhaps the fact that the Citadel level does not make extensive use of shaders is holding the Mobility Radeon 9000 back.

Unreal Tournament 2003 ctf-citadel @ 1280x1024x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 45.3 40.8 | 0 | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 | 54

Stepping the resolution up one more level increases the advantage that the Mobility Radeon 9000, this time amounting to 11%.

The br-endagra demo tests the performance of the card in the bombing run gameplay mode.

Unreal Tournament 2003 br-endagra @ 800x600x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 110.4 89.2 | 0 | 22 | 44 | 66 | 88 | 110 | 132

So much for those mediocre performance increases that we saw in the Citadel and Antalus demos. In the Endagra demo, the Mobility Radeon 9000 performs 24% faster than the GeForce4 440 Go, likely due to increased shader functions.

Unreal Tournament 2003 br-endagra @ 1024x768x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 80.7 64.2 | 0 | 16 | 32 | 48 | 65 | 81 | 97

The performance delta widens as the resolution of the Endagra demo is increased to 1024x768x32. Now we are seeing the Mobility Radeon 9000 offer a 26% speed boost.

Unreal Tournament 2003 br-endagra @ 1280x1024x32 Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB GeForce4 440 Go 64MB 53.9 42.6 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 32 | 43 | 54 | 65

In the same demo at 1280x1024x32 the Mobility Radeon 9000 brings to the table the largest performance advantage it has enjoyed as of yet at 27%.