Sapphire HD4870 512mb DDR5
Quake 4 is a game built on the Doom 3 engine. Benchmarking was performed using Quake4Bench and a custom timedemo recording. The benchmark was set to run a total of 5 times, with Quake4Bench automatically calculating an average result at the end of the run.
The Quake engine sees the NVidia cards once again take the advantage. I was bemused that the Quake engine seemed to limit the ATI’s performance somewhat with the application of AA not making any discernible difference to the results. The NVidia cards had no such trouble ripping through the benchmark with ease. Perhaps not the best game for ATI fans.
Unreal Tournament 3 is the highly anticipated game from Epic Games and Midway. The game uses the latest Unreal engine, which combines fast gameplay along with high quality textures and lighting effects. All benchmarks were performed using UTbench with a fly-by of the DM-BioHazard map. As usual, all benchmarks were performed 5 times, with the highest and lowest results being removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.
Again NVidia land on top with the Unreal graphics engine proffering NVidia to ATI. This is not to say that the ATI cards had a poor showing in Unreal Tournament III as 136FPS is nothing to be sniffed at but they are some 35 FPS shy of their NVidia counterparts in this particular game.
Throughout all the benchmarks, particular attention should be given to cost per frame which shows that the ATI cards have a distinct advantage over NVidia – even after NVidia dropped their prices recently.
