We begin our look at Direct3D games with Unreal Tournament which was developed by Epic. Unreal Tournament is not a widely used graphics benchmark since its performance is heavily dependent on processor speed.

There are a variety of graphics settings in Unreal Tournament and I normally keep them on their default values. A popular benchmark is the UTBench which can be downloaded from our files page. A demo that I've recently begun to use is the Reverend's Thunder demo as performance between resolutions scales much better than the UTBench demo.

Store the demo under the \Unreal Tournament\System directory. If you want to benchmark with sound disabled, a shortcut to the executable needs to be created and the -nosound option added as a command line parameter. For example:

D:\Games\UnrealTournament\System\UnrealTournament.exe -nosound.

• Upon entering the game, choose the Tool menu option and check Timedemo Statistics.



• Choose the Options menu option and set the Min Desired Framerate to 0.



• Bring up the console by pressing the ~ key.



• Type in Preferences and ensure that VSYNC is set to false under Rendering - Direct3D.



• Press the ~ key to exit the console.



• Choose Game - Start a Practice Session from the menu and load any map.



• Once the map loads, go back to the console, and enter the timedemo mode by entering timedemo 1.



• Enter demoplay utbench noframecap timebased where utbench is the name of the demo.



• Exit the console before the demo begins.
  
  
• After the demo is complete, go back to the console to see the results.

If you want to run another benchmark with a different resolution and/or color depth, the setres command can be entered directly in the console: setres 640x480x16 or setres 800x600x32.

Unreal Tournament Results

Stay tuned for the next installment of our Guide to Benchmarking which will cover a few more Direct3D games. Until then, Happy Benchmarking!

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