Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance

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 section, we've taken the cards through the UT 2003 wringer and show benchmark results for the more video-centric Flyby test.

The Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby benchmarking is a great high-end video card test, and here the ASUS Radeon 9600XT/TVD really shows us some speed. It posts the highest standard scores, across the board, while coming in right next to the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in AA and AF testing. The difference in default vs. dynamic overclocking modes continues to be slight, simply giving a small boost to this mid-range video card.

Unreal Tournament 2004 Performance

The Unreal Tournament demo 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 video cards. For this benchmark, we've used the UMark GUI interface with the following settings: Colossus map, 12 players and High Image Quality graphics.

The UT 2004 Botmatch scores follow those of UT 2003 for the most part, and once again we have the ASUS Radeon 9600XT/TVD out in front, but this time, its superiority goes right across the board. It places nicely ahead of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, and shows that the ATI design and feature set is a boon for recent and upcoming 3D games.

Halo: Combat Evolved Performance

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.

The Halo benchmark results follow some of our previous game tests, and the ASUS Radeon 9600XT/TVD does fall a bit back of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra when AA and AF settings are enabled, it owns the NVIDIA card in standard testing.