Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004 Epic's Next Smash Hit!

Unreal Tournament 2004

Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003 rapidly became some of our favorites for both benchmarking and for killing a few hours when our schedules permitted it. Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a patched (v3339) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200, without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and lastly with 4X AA and 8X aniso.  In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of a multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

Unreal Tournament 2004 gave us the same kind of results we saw in the other benchmarks.  While the Albatron PC6600U seems to be a good performer, it just doesn't match up very well against two of ATi's mid-range cards.  The X700 Pro almost always seems to keep a step ahead of the PC6600U, and the margin only increases when AA and Aniso are implemented.