Unreal Tournament 2003

The Unreal Tournament 2003 engine is known by hardware enthusiasts and casual gamers alike. It has become the standard for measuring Direct3d performance under a Directx 8.0 enviroment. As with most death matching first-person shooters, a high consistent frame rate is desirable.

I used fraps and took three preset runs through DM-Antalus and DM-Inferno spanning multiple resolutions of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings. The three results were then divided by three to reduce margin for error. Bots were also removed to keep the levels consistent. All settings were set to max within settings menu.

Unreal Tournament 2003 DM-Antalus Results

When I first loaded up Antalus, I was pleasantly surprised. The 5700 Personal Cinema seemed quite capable of playing this game with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. The new color compression seems to really be doing its work here.

Unreal Tournament 2003 DM-Inferno Results

DM-Inferno is a bit more GPU intensive than Antalus. Proving to be a larger strain on graphic card, the 5700 still manages to deliver 30 FPS with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering were playable on the 5700, but I felt setting the anisotropic filtering slider to performance made the game much more playable to me. Some users might prefer to change other image quality settings to better adjust to their liking.

Everquest: Gates of Discord

Everquest still is probably the most popular multiplayer online role playing game right now. Its engine has progressed a great deal over the past few years. It now requires DirectX 9.0 to be installed on your machine, and it features pixel shaded skies and vertex skinned player characters.

I used the two Everquest zones of Nedaria's Landing and the City of Shadowhaven to conduct these tests. I used fraps and took three preset runs through the zones spanning multiple resolutions of anti aliasing and anistropic filtering settings. The three results were then divided by three to reduce margin of error. All settings were set to max and clip plane was set to 80 percent.

Everquest: Gates of Discord City of Shadow Haven Results

City of Shadow Haven shows itself to be very CPU limited on the 5700 Personal Cinema. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering can be enabled with practically no performance hit at 1024x768 resolution. After playing the game with the FX 5700 I can safely say that you can keep 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled at all times. There is a relatively low performance advantage to turning it off.

Everquest: Gates of Discord Nedaria's Landing Results

Nedaria's landing paints a different picture for cpu limitations. The GeForce FX 5700 Personal Cinema starts off CPU limited, but enabling anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cause the card to take more of a performance hit.

Reviewer's Note: Everquest appears to have difficulty with the Radeon 8500's implementation of anisotropic filtering. The mipmap boundaries do not appear to be recieving filtering at all, causing large amounts of texture shimmering in the game, rendering anisotropic filtering on this card unusable.

WARCRAFT III: The Frozen Throne