First Person Shooters are always used in graphics card reviews and there will be no change here. Until Doom3 and Half-life 2 hit the streets later this year Unreal Tournament 2003’s engine is the most demanding FPS engine out there. That combined with its inbuilt benchmarking utility makes it a great choice to show how the 9800 Pro performs in today’s games.

 

1024x768 0xAA 0xAF	1024x768 2xAA 8xAF	1024x768 4xAA 16xAF
1280X960 0xAA 0xAF	1280X960 2xAA 8xAF	1280X960S 4xAA 16xAF
1600X1200 0xAA 0xAF	1600X1200 2xAA 8xAF	1600X1200 4xAA 16xAF

 

Watching the Unreal Tournament tests was a truly interesting experience, the sheer impressiveness of the card really showed. It is all very well being the fastest card in 3D Mark but when it comes down to it end users don’t play 3D Mark, they play the latest games. At 1024x768, a resolution that most cards would begin to struggle with the 9800 was not even slightly troubled. When using 4xAA and 16xAF the flyby was still well over 100fps and botmatch had only fallen 1fps from 0xAA and 0xAF. The first time the flyby fell below the 100fps mark was when the settings were moved up to 1280x960 with 4xAA and 16xAF. Moving on to 1600x1200 the results with no AA and no AF were astounding. Very little performance difference from the results at 1024x768!

Next: Overclocking and Conclusion