It is hard to believe that it has been 3 and a half years since we first published our performance numbers of the first 64 bit game, Unreal Tourament 2004 under Linux.  That was over 300 articles ago, and today we bring the latest installment of Unreal Tournament, UT3.  Ironically 64 bit still doesn't really matter much in gaming, and today we will be testing in Windows XP again as we were doing when UT2004 came out.  Some things change, some things stay the same.  We tested with the following 9 video cards for our first results.

GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
GeForce 8800GTS 320MB
GeForce 8600GTS
GeForce 8600GT
GeForce 7900GTX
GeForce 7900GT
GeForce 7600GT
Radeon 1950Pro
Radeon 2600XT
 

Here's our test system.  We used the Windows XP Professional 32 bit with the beta Nvidia drivers version 169.75 released earlier this week.

Fraps was the only solution for Unreal Tournament 3. We tested near the end of the demo where you are fighting off enemies from a tank.  The settings were set to maximum of 5 on each slider.

 

As you can see you can get pretty good performance from Unreal Tournament 3 in DX9 mode especially compared to what we just got in Call of Duty 4.  Here the 8800s both hit 100FPS.  GeForce cards are clearly happy as the 7900s come in 3rd and 4th.  Then we have the Radeon X1950 Pro, 8600GTS, and 2600XT pretty closely bunched just South of 45FPS.  Only the 7600GT can't seem to handle things at 21FPS.

At 1600X1200 we see the cards stack up almost exactly in the same order with the 8800s leading the pack at 77 and 78 frames with the extra 320MB accounting for 1 frame performance advantage.  Again the 7900s are next in line with the X1950 Pro trying to keep up.  The rest of the cards hover around 30FPS with the exception of the poor 7600GT that hits only 16FPS.  Certainly however most of these cards are looking fairly good especially considering that the graphic settings were completely maxed out.

Stay tuned as we continue to add performance numbers for Unreal Tournament 3.  In the mean time please do check out our benchmarks of Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 at the links below.

Call of Duty 4 Beta GPU Performance
Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Portal Performance
Team Fortress 2 Beta Performance
Bioshock DX9 and DX10 Performance
id Software's Marty Stratton Interview
Company of Heroes DX9/10 Image Quality Comparison
Enemy Territory Quake Wars Beta Performance
Company of Heroes DirectX 10 Performance Revealed
Lost Planet Benchmarks
Unreal 3 Engine Performance With Rainbow Six: Vegas
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Beta Performance
Company of Heroes Performance