Benchmarking UT2004....

It seems that I am under the spell of older games nowadays...not! I was actually thinking of how to enrich the benchmarking experiences and at the same time trying to find the way to justify my X800 GTO performances. What a lame excuse anyway!.

I installed Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo (too lazy to install the full version), with the same settings as usual:

- X800 GTO at 500/550 core/mem
- Max. settings in the graphics option in UT2004 at 1024x768 res.
- Forced 4X AA, 8X AF in the driver setting.
- FRAPS benchmarks at 60 secs, then averaged. Run for 4 times.

I chose to play the Team Deatchmatch. The map is an indoor map just to get the environment with the most triangles, vertices at all times.

Results

Running no./ no. of frames	Min. FPS	Max. FPS	Avg. FPS
1/ 5025 frames	61	86	83.8
2/ 4694 frames	47	86	78.2
3/ 5047 frames	72	86	84.1
4/ 4448 frames	54	86	74.1

Those are what's reported by FRAPS after the benchmark. One obvious thing to note is that the performance at 1024x768 is capped at 86 FPS. However, the number of frames involved in each of four runs are not the same. This is probably due to the fact that for each test of 60 seconds, I didn't follow the same route and environment. I don't know how to benchmark UT2004 properly using the FlyBy demo..bla bla..whatsoever, so this is the only method I can use. Whatever it is, the benchmark gives me some idea that I was running UT2004 for more than 70 FPS at all time. That's more than enough as 60 FPS is considered as the point where human eyes can barely see the differences of FPS above it.

Graphical anomaly?

I did say that I forced the game to run at 8X anisotrophic filtering, right? Take a look at the screenshot below.



Click the pic above for the biggest size available at my Flickr. If you look carefully at the floor above 'You've won the match!' bar (about half an inch), you can see that the floor textures are sharp, but above that, the textures are blurry (for those who are familiar with Image Quality investigation, this is easy to notice!). IMO, that is not showing a sign of 8X AF being applied at all. I have some other screenshots that shows the same property, but enough for me to show just one. I guess this is a bug in the driver, or maybe the game has problem rendering the filtering, I just don't know.

This is another older game that I enjoyed replaying under new graphics accelerator. It is a fast pace FPS game that really demands high framerates to enjoy it. Just like my experience with NFSU 2, I feel that I can finally play this game the way it is meant to be played!

Screenshots: