Unreal Tournament 2003 includes a benchmark program that automatically tests in two separate modes. The one we're going to be looking at is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world and then offers up a framerate score and really hammers both the CPU and video card. The Botmatch results are no longer shown, instead leaving that for the new Unreal Tournament 2004 to supply.
The Sempron 2800+/nforce2 advantage continues in Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby testing, and the Celeron 335/Intel Extreme Graphics 2 combo simply can't match up. But once the Radeon 9600 Pro is brought into the equation, the two platforms finish in a dead heat. The Sempron 3100+ continues its impressive run by taking the top spot in UT 2003 benchmarking, and its dominance in the gaming arena is quite surprising for such a low-cost CPU.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is an upgraded version of the popular UT series, and also includes support for Botchmatch demos. This is the next step for Unreal Tournament graphics and performance, and is another serious test for current PC hardware. For this benchmark, we've used the UMark GUI interface with the following settings: Colossus map, 12 players and High Image Quality graphics.
Once again the Sempron 2800+ owns the Celeron 335 in terms of integrated video performance, and even takes it to the Intel value chip with dedicated AGP graphics. UT 2004 also gives us another performance win for the Sempron 3100+, and it provides a very noticeable margin of victory.
Halo: Combat Evolved is a hot, action adventure game that not only features luscious indoor and outdoor graphics and a killer story, but some very innovative gameplay as well. Our Halo test uses the default timedemo, while also enabling 2.0 shaders for all benchmark testing.
Halo is another clear victory for the Sempron 2800+ and its GeForce4 MX integrated video, but the field is leveled once we add in the Radeon 9600 Pro. The rest of the scores are virtually equivalent, and Halo demonstrates once again that some games are more video card-centric, and simply do not make full use of extra CPU resources.
