Review By Kalyan Rai - December 13, 2004 Edited By Ed Piotrowski
HALO
Halo's graphics engine makes use of pixel shader 2.0 and bump mapping for rendering of its visuals. It proved to be a torture test for previous generation cards. Gearbox has since released the Custom Edition multiplayer add-on pack, which boosts overall performance. The in-built timedemo was run on the PS 2.0 rendering path to compile the following results with all in-game settings set to the max. It must be noted that Halo does not support antialiasing.
Results
The Leadtek A400 Ultra TDH truly rips through Halo. Playing the game is now a fun experience even at resolutions of 1280 x 1024. Gone are the days where you need to tweak certain settings to allow for smoother gameplay. Instead, you can now enjoy Halo as it was meant to be in all its rendered glory.
UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004
The new Unreal Tournament game offers fast-paced online gameplay with some visually impressive (and expansive) Onslaught levels. The level of pixel shading used by Unreal Tournament 2004's graphics engine is thought to be somewhat limited, but the visuals provided use lots of complex texture blending. All in-game settings where set to the max and demos (made by MikeC) were used, including: An Onslaught match on ONS_Dria and Deathmatch DM_Inferno.
Results
The onslaught demo is stressful on the Leadtek A400 Ultra TDH. The results, however, are similar no matter the resolution or IQ settings. My CPU is the bottleneck here. The results on MikeC's DM_Inferno demo shows what maybe a more typical experience. Benchmarks aside, the Leadtek A400 Ultra TDH is more than capable of delivering the horsepower needed for a typical online UT2004 gaming session at 1280 x 1024 with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled. Maps that are huge may push the frame rates down on any video card, but nowhere as severe as the ONS_Dria results suggest considering the CPU limitation.
