Review By John Grabski - June 11, 2004 Edited By Ed Piotrowski
UNREAL 2
Although Unreal 2 has been out for a while now, it is still considered a graphical masterpiece. This single player missions feature high polygon counts for both players/characters and environments, a large scale terrain rendering system, procedural character animations and blending a new skeletal animation system with component level controllers. Unreal 2 also contains an advanced particle system to generate fire, smoke, hair, weather and breaking glass effects. Also present in the feature list is texture compression, alpha blending, distance fog, advanced particle physics and per-polygon collision detection.
Unreal 2
The Skaarj Elevator Confrontation was used to benchmark Unreal 2. All in-game graphics settings were at their maximum level and shadows were enabled.
Results
Even with the shadows cranked and all of the effects maxed, BFG's 5900XT OC provided playable framerates in this scene up to 1280x1024, with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled. Unreal 2 is not as fast-paced as some of its brethren, so a framerate in the 30's is not such a bad thing here.
Preferred Setting: 1280x1024 with 2X AA and 8X AF
UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004
Building on Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2003 technology, Unreal Tournament 2004 was well received by the gaming community. UT2004 features new gameplay modes, characters, maps, and weapons along with the introduction of vehicles. Rendering enhancements include refined special effects and light use of DirectX 8-class pixel and vertex shaders.
Unreal Tournament 2004
Benchmarks in UT2004 were run with UMark. An 8-player botmatch was run on the BR-Anubis map with the High Image Quality setting, which uses the MaxDetail.ini and MaxDetailUser.ini initialization files.
Results
The preferred average framerate for a first person shooter should be close to 60 frames per second. In this test, the BFG GeForce FX 5900XT OC handles itself admirably and manages to produce a playable framerate at 1600x1200 with no AA and 8X AF.
Preferred Setting: 1280x1024 with 2X AA and 8X AF
BATTLEFIELD: VIETNAM
In his review of Battlefield: Vietnam, nV News game reviewer Brian Cochran concluded that his experience with Battlefield Vietnam was spectacular, although there were areas that left him frustrated.
Battlefield: Vietnam
Battlefield Vietnam was benchmarked with highest graphics quality, shadows on, and low quality audio. A walkthrough of the Quang Tri 1972 map was conducted with bots and enemy AI turned all the way down.
Results
Similar to Far Cry, Battlefield Vietnam requires an outlandish amount of graphical power for smooth gameplay at the highest quality settings. The Battlefield series of games are well known for being updated as Battlefield 1942 has had eight patches since being released. The full patch for version 1.6 was released in January of 2004 and is a whopping 268MB!
Gameplay in Battlefield Vietnam is optimal when responsiveness is similar to Unreal Tournament. However, obtaining performance reminiscent of UT are out of the question for now. In the meantime, the game is playable at the "low" resolution of 1024x768. Lowering the texture quality a notch to the high setting provided a noticeable increase in performance.
Preferred Setting: None of the benchmarked settings, that's for sure. I recommend that in-game graphics quality be turned down a notch or two and to disable shadows. I don't particularly like to recommend that image quality be lowered for the sake of performance, but it's possible that BF Vietnam will require the latest generation of graphics cards to maintain playable framerates at higher resolutions and maximum eye candy. At the moment, I prefer to play BF Vietnam at 1024x768 with 2X AA and 8X AF. By lowering the graphics settings to medium, eliminating shadows, and keeping everything else on I averaged around 57 frames per second.
