Performance - Unreal 2003

Unreal 2003

The Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark is much more modern than Quake III. This is not the Unreal 2003 performance test as used by some other websites, contrary to that, it's based on the demo.

Since the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo is out and available as a free download, you can get it at just about any file download site (link). Be prepared to download 100MB of data though. 

One nice little addition to UT2003 demo is that it has a built-in benchmark utility. You can find the benchmark in the system subdirectory for the game after it installs. The file is appropriately named 'benchmark.exe'. Run this file, select the resolution you want to benchmark, and it will go through 4 different demos, 2 are "flyby" and 2 are "botmatch" demos. The flyby demos give you an idea of how high frame rates would be without bots, while the botmatch demos give you an idea of what kind of fps you can expect while actually playing the game. The benchmark actually leverages more cpu and graphics intensive technologies that the engine is capable of.

We recently switched to a custom timedemo to prevent cheating as described earlier. We did use a more CPU dependent timedemo yet with a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 that should not be such a problem right? Let's have a look at the results.

One more Unreal title, this time just with 4xAA and 8xAF settings. Really good results, the x800 XT beats the 6800 Ultra. The Pro is doing amazing numbers at 1600x1200x32 with 69 FPS. That's close to that 6800 Ultra. Let's move on to a golden oldie in our test suite, Quake III Arena: