Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT (NVIDIA FX 5950 Ultra)
Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo
The release of games like Unreal Tournament 2004 is always anticipated with impatiently. Of course, there is not so much hype like it is about Half-Life 2 or DooM III, but the key points of this game are highlighted in a somehow different way. Originally, Unreal Tournament 2004 (like Unreal Tournament 2003) was targeted at wide gaming community with the emphasis made on that the game be played for many years. The notion "cyber-sport" (or "e-sport") was tightly associated with Unreal Tournament (in the year 2003 edition, and now in year 2004).
It's just this fact that attracted undivided attention from graphic chips manufacturers (and, above all, their driver-writers :), because hardly ever one wants to lose potential customers who find it important that the operation of the board in this very game be fast enough, and the gaming community is more than honorable.
The graphic engine of Unreal Tournament 2004 does not bring anything new. The Unreal Engine does not use great number of pixel and vertex shaders in the game, so the board's performance at Pixel Shaders 2.0 is the cornerstone in reviewing the performance of boards in this application.
Originally, the demo version of Unreal Tournament 2004 did not provide benchmarking functionality. Although the "Benchmark" folder existed, it was empty. That is, it seemed like one had to forget about the benchmark (especially that the game's option of creating your own demos through the "/record" command was also disabled), but the solution to the problem turned out to be simple enough. As it turned out, there are demos for the benchmark - but their use was simply not enabled, and to make them run you would have to change the paths and map names in the *.bat files as per the resources provided in the demo version of Unreal Tournament 2004. In the branch of the same forum you can find a link to ready *.bat files for the benchmark. However, note that the thus enabled benchmark works incorrectly with flyby demos. On starting the above, simple the level with the only fixed item is shown, but no fly-around is performed. Therefore, we had to use only the "botmatch-tests" recorded in all possible modes of the future game of Epic's. Also, before we proceed directly to tests in the game, note that the quality of textures in the demo version matches that for the "Normal" level. That is, tests in the demo version of Unreal Tournament 2004 will not give us a vivid idea of the absolute fps values, nevertheless it places all the tested boards in similar conditions.
 For tests, we traditionally selected the maximum possible quality settings from the menu. The antialiasing and anisotropic filtering were forced from the video card drivers.
In most of the demos presented in the demo version, we can't establish a one-one leader. Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT, due to its increased core clocking takes a small lead at all of the tests. As regards the fair comparison of ATI Radeon 9800XT vs NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, we can only establish a complete parity except in the Botmatch Colossus test at which the board based on ATI chip leaps forward leaving its rivals well behind.
And again we get an approximate parity of all the cards.
In the 1600x1200x32 resolution, when the fps in the game depends more on the operation speed of the graphic accelerator and not on the CPU speed, we can get a better idea of the alignment of forces on the graphics front. The leadership of ATI board in the "Botmatch Colossus" test enhanced with the increase of resolution, but in the "Botmatch Bridgeoffate" test, on the contrary, the board based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra proved to be a sure leader.
Such vague and queer, at first glance, ratios of performances for the top-end accelerators of ATI and NVIDIA in different demos can be explained by the difference in the scene geometry, its size (e.g. narrow corridors of DeatchMatch levels versus vast spaces in Assault), which in the end gives a leadership for ATI boards in one test as opposed to NVIDIA'a leadership in other tests. In the total, we get an approximate parity. However, let's see how the alignment of forces will be affected if we enable the image improvement techniques
Once the FSAA is enabled, we see quite uniform results for all the cards without exception. Only Gigabyte is traditionally a bit faster because of the 520 MHz graphics core.
With the forced AF, the situation dramatically changes to the better in favor of NVIDIA. All this happens despite that NVIDIA's AF results are usually worse because of the specific image processing algorithms... The AF modes grab the leadership crown away from NVIDIA's products in most applications. This fact will be studied in more detail in further materials.
And finally, the most demanding modes combining the AF+AA bring victory to NVIDIA - the faster anisotropy in this benchmark makes itself felt.
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