Unreal Tournament 3 CPU & High End GPU Analysis: Next-Gen Gaming Explored
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 17, 2007 3:35 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Multi-Core Gaming is Upon Us
Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is well threaded, it must be in order to run on the multi-core Microsoft and Sony consoles, and thus us multi-core PC users benefit.
Intel has been waiting for a real reason to push quad-core gaming for a while now, will UT3 be that reason?
We don't often look at single-core performance given how cheap dual-core CPUs are today, but it's important to look at where we've come from over the past couple of years.
One to two cores gives us an impressive 60% increase in performance on average, if we look back at our first dual-core processor review none of our gaming tests showed any performance increase from one to two cores. From 0 - 60% in two years isn't bad at all.
The performance improvement from 2 to 4 cores isn't anywhere near as impressive, but still reasonable. In our first two tests we see a 9% increase and the third one gives us a 20% boost, for an average 13% jump in performance.
If 3D games follow the same trend that we've seen over the past two years, it'll be another two years from now before we really see significant performance increases from quad-core processors. If in 2009 we hardly bother with dual-core chips because quad-core is so prevalent, you'll not hear any complaining from us.
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p30n - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
very good point.retrospooty - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
"What does this show us? At least for UT3 quad (vs dual) is rather a waste."ya, thats pretty much what they said in the article. They tested it so the results can be known.
thompsjt1 - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
"THERE ARE NO HIGH RESOLUTION TEXTURES" in the UT3 BETA demo. They didn't include them for download size reasons and I am sure they WILL include them in the real official demo and I think once you are running these high resolution textures and settings are maximized, we will see bigger difference of Nvidia vs AMD numbers.pnyffeler - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The article spent a lot of time on the effect of the size of the cache on an Intel processor, but what about AMD? Does the size of the cache matter, or is this yet another example of Intel's Northbridge system being trumped by AMD's advantage of having the memory controller on the CPU?I have no misconceptions that AMD has a chance of topping an Intel here. I'm just curious to see how much better Nehalem will be.
P.S. Thumbs down on the CPU comparison. You said in the setup you were going to test an X2 4200, but it never made the charts. And what about an 8600 GT? I'm going to be running this game at 640x480, aren't I....
NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
I believe they did not really test AMD's cpus right now due to the awaiting arrival of Phenom which is less than a month away.Looks as though the 200-250 range (RV670 bins) are going to kick some bahooty given their higher core speeds, especially at the 1280x1024, 1600x1200, and 1680x1050 resolutions.
Chaser - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
I knew with mature drivers this card would rock. It only too a short amount of time. Good job ATI and Anandtech for demonstrating this.
aka1nas - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
That's mainly because there is no AA applied because the UT3 engine doesn't support it in Dx9 mode. AA has been the R600s stumbling block.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Multi-Sampling seems to run fine, it is Super Sampling that seems to be broken.shabby - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The beta demo looks nothing like epic wanted us to think, these pics are back from july.http://ve3d.ign.com/images/fullsize/143/PC/Unreal-...">http://ve3d.ign.com/images/fullsize/143/PC/Unreal-...
swaaye - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
It looks nothing like that because that is a ultra supersampled bullshot. Just like every single other game gets these days. In reality, UT3 looks as good as Gears of War right now, and will look a lot better once we get the high quality assets with the full game.