Unreal Tournament 3 Performance
The Unreal Tournament 3 demo that was recently released is one of the many upcoming games that are getting PC gaming back on the map. Luckily for us, the game engine is threaded in a way to support multi-core CPUs and improvements can be seen even at resolutions as high as 1600×1200.
The first map we tested is the Heat Ray level; it’s smaller and doesn’t have as long a field of view as some of the larger team maps. At 1024×768 with High IQ settings, the QX9650 is able to produce a frame rate 12% higher on average than the QX6850 and 43% faster than the X6800 CPU. Unfortunately for AMD, that gap is 130% with their top performer here, the 6000+. At 1600×1200 those gaps are diminished somewhat though there are still noticeable performance differences when comparing the quad- and dual-core CPUs.
The Suspense map is larger and used for larger team battles. At 1024×768 the QX9650 has a 10% average FPS lead over the QX6850 and a 31% frame rate lead over the X6800. The scores here at 1600×1200 go down a bit but the performance gaps remain because of the large size of the map.
If this isn’t proof that GPUs are no longer the only bottleneck for gaming going forward, I think I know another title that will convince you…check back next week for more on that!
