Unreal Tournament 2003 includes a benchmark program that automatically tests two separate modes. One is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world and then offers up a framerate score. The second is Botmatch, and this is a more game-oriented test than Flyby, but it also brings with it added CPU dependency. In this next section, we've taken all the cards through the UT 2003 wringer and show benchmark charts for both of the game tests.
The UT 2003 Botmatch benchmark scores are about where we expected, with the XFX GeForce FX 5900 Ultra staying slightly behind the pack in terms of overall framerates. Even so, this is one area that the newest driver revision seems to have shored up a few weaknesses, and makes nice strides over the lower-than 80 FPS we clocked in previous reviews. The improvement even goes so far as to place the XFX GeForce FX 5900 Ultra ahead of the Radeon 9800 Pro at 1600x1200.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby benchmark test is more open-ended for the video card portion, and really shows up in the scores. Overall framerates are much higher, and we see a real separation between the video cards. In this area, the XFX GeForce FX 5900 Ultra performs extremely well, and is only slightly behind the Radeon 9800 XT with OverDrive.
The more detailed 4X AA and 8X AF settings do eat into the performance gap, and now we see the XFX GeForce FX 5900 Ultra falling further back of the Radeon 9800 XT, though still remaining ahead of the standard Radeon 9800 Pro.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby AA and AF benchmark results paint a very different picture, and the lead of the XFX GeForce FX 5900 Ultra has evaporated, and the card's performance now drops below that of the Radeon 9800 Pro.
