Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2003) has become a popular benchmark for measuring the performance of today's graphics cards. Developed by Digital Extremes and Epic Games, the graphics in UT2003 were developed using Microsoft's DirectX applications programming interface. While UT2003 contains a comprehensive suite of benchmarking features, there's no substitute for measuring "real-world" performance other than by playing the game. Plain and simple - and fun!

Although UT2003 is primarily targeted as a multi-player game, it has a mode that allows the player to create matches against computer controlled bots, otherwise known as bot-matches. It's under this scenario that I put my system up to the test against one of the most demanding games on the market.

The demo of UT2003 contains two levels, or maps, that serve as your battlefield. The outdoor map DM-Antalus will cause greater stress on your computer system then DM-Asbestos. Outdoor levels typically contain a much larger field of view, which results in an increase in the number of polygons and textures that are processed by the graphics hardware.

The following sections list the graphics and sound menu settings in UT2003 that were used during game play sessions.

Graphics Settings

• Full Screen - 32-Bit Color
• Texture Detail - Normal
• World Detail - Highest
• Character Detail - Normal
• Physics Detail - Normal
• Character Shadows - Enabled
• Dynamic Lighting - Enabled
• Detail Textures - Enabled
• Projectors - Enabled
• Decals - Enabled
• Coronas - Enabled
• Decal Stay - Normal
• Foliage - Enabled
• Trilinear Filtering - Enabled
• Coronas - Enabled

Sound Settings

• Audio Mode - Hardware 3D Audio
• Message Beep - Enabled
• Mature Taunts - Enabled
• Play Voices - All
• Announcements - All

The following sections contain a listing of my system specifications.

System Specifications

• AMD Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17GHz - Thouroughbred Revision B
• ASUS A7NX8 Retail nForce2 Motherboard
• NVIDIA nForce2 Chipset With DualDDR Memory
• Corsair PC3200 DDR SDRAM - (2) 256MB DIMMs - 512MB Total
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80GB 7200RPM ATA-133 Hard Disk Drive
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40GB 7200RPM ATA-100 Hard Disk Drive
• Sony Multiscan E500 CRT Monitor - 21-Inch
• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 - 128MB
• NVIDIA Detonator XP Driver Version 41.09
• 32-Bit Color / Sound Enabled / Vsync Disabled / 75Hz Refresh Rate
• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 / DirectX 8.1

BIOS Settings

• Agressive Settings
• Expert System Performance
• 166MHz Front Side Bus
• Memory Timing 4-2-2
• CAS Latency 2.0
• APIC Mode Disabled

Data Collection

Frame rate data was collected using FRAPS, which runs as a background task. Two deathmatch games were played against six "skilled" bots with each match lasting around three minutes. The benchmark results are based on averaging the frame rates obtained from the two matches.

Having run through a number of test cases with UT2003 and bot-matches, the minimum and average frame rates reported by FRAPS typically varied 1-3 frames per second. The maximum frame rate experienced greater variations.

Performance is shown with bar charts that display the maximum (red), average (green), and minimum (blue) frames per second, per resolution. The first charts show my results with no antialiasing and trilinear filtering from the outdoor level DM-Antalus.

Playing DM-Antalus at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x960 offered acceptable performance in each match. Although 1280x960 failed to reach an average frame rate of 60, a minimum frame rate of 30 is an indication that noticeable slowdowns in performance didn't occur. I could increase performance by 10% if player shadows were disabled.

Let's move on to the less demanding indoor map DM-Asbestos.

I'll continue to use the outdoor DM-Antalus map and also enable 2X antialiasing.