Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo
Unreal Tournament 2004, with Epic's and the Unreal community's support, continues to provides the gamer with plenty of fast-paced action and is one of the leading graphics engines in use today.

UMark's versatile benchmark was used to record frame rate results.  I elected to use AS-Convoy, BR-Bridge of Fate, and CTF-Citadel maps for testing performance of the 6800GT.  Being a cpu intensive game I stayed with default frequency clocks of 350/1.0 throughout the benchmarks.  Again, the X800Pro provided performance comparison.

UT2004 Demo Results

Keep in mind that the results are based on the demo of UT2004, which has normal as the highest texture detail level. The full version of UT2004 contains four additional levels of texture detail that enhance image quality at the expense of performance.  Except for the two 'wins' for the X800Pro at 1600x1200 resolution the 6800GT was the overall winner.  One extra bench for each card was run showing capability of running at higher settings in this game.

A little extra UT2004 benching results.....

UT2004 Demo Results

Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.2GHz Resolution 1024x769 1280x1024 1600x1200 eVGA 6800 GT No AA / 4X AF 55.84 54.47 52.91 4X AA / 8X AF 54.03 49.41 40.54 8XS AA / 16X AF 44.96 40.54 18.41 ATI X800Pro No AA / 4X AF 53.47 52.94 51.35 4X AA / 8X AF 53.41 50.20 42.83 6X AA / 16X AF 51.35 43.74 34.28

Both cards performed almost identical in Dria.  The 6800GT does take a significant hit when 8XS AA / 16X AF is applied at 1600x1200 resolution.  In actual game play I found both cards performed well with 4x AA / 8x AF at all resolutions.  Anything above this revealed some problems for both cards.

MORROWIND

This game has been a favorite of mine since it first came out.  While it is not easy to benchmark Mike did setup a run through sequence in Seyda Neen which makes for comparable results.  Each benchmark was performed a minimum of three times and an average of the three yielded the recorded result as identified in the table.

Morrowind

Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.2GHz eVGA 6800 GT Resolution  No AA / 4x AF  4x AA / 8x AF 8XS AA/16x AF 1024x768 74.34 73.60 73.08 1280x960 74.77 73.37 72.46 1600x1200 74.59 63.82 32.59

Ok, ok, so I am a Morrowind addict.  It's still a great RPG and benefits from a strong processor and video card.  One thing I can say is that with the eVGA 6800GT the days of 30 frames per second are over and that is with in-game settings set at the highest except for view distance which I set at 50% and shadows off.  But this was just for benching and not for the game.  In the game I did notice that shadows of women in dresses did not render the dress shapes.  I must be getting slow as I have not noticed this before!

The game played exceptionally smooth, fast, and I did not observe any problems during several hours of game play.  The eVGA 6800GT enhanced the game play with only a slight noticeable pause going from one area to another unlike the previous cards such as the FX5950U and 9800Pro that I used most recently with this game.

Overclocking in Morrowind revealed insignificant increase in frame rates until 1600x1200 with 4x AA / 8x AF settings.  At these settings frame rates increased 8 frames per second or about a 9% increase.  Not bad, playing Morrowind at 70 FPS at high resolution and 4x AA/ 8x AF applied!  I played a session in Bloodmoon with these settings and results were excellent.  Of course, high frame rates are not required to make Morrowind enjoyable but stability is.

The eVGA proved to be very stable in this game at all settings with the only thing noticed was a slightly sluggish mouse movement at 1600x1200, 8XS AA / 16x AF settings.  Anyway, I could not see an advantage of such high settings over 4x AA / 8x AF at any resolution in Morrowind.

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