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
FSB Scaling: 1066MHz, 1333MHz
It's not all about on-die cache with UT3; we wanted to see if the L2 cache dependency also extended to needing a fast memory subsystem as well. Intel's Core 2 CPUs still rely on an aging front side bus to make the journey out to main memory, so we toyed with increasing the FSB from 1066MHz up to 1333MHz to see how large of an impact existed on UT3.
Our original investigations into FSB performance showed that the move to 1333MHz wasn't a big deal, yielding low single-digit performance improvements in our usual tests.
Unreal Tournament 3 appears to be no different, even with four cores consuming data at 2.66GHz we're looking at a 3% increase in performance on average. The 1333MHz FSB isn't really necessary, while it would make more of a difference at smaller cache sizes, Intel just doesn't offer CPUs with small caches and 1333MHz FSBs.
Large caches? Absolutely. Faster FSB? Not necessary.
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retrospooty - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
The demo is not full detail, its a playable test with lower image settings than the final game. Wait and see the final before we see what its "supposed" to look like.shabby - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
If its really going to look like these pics then this performance review is useless, fps will drop by half. Im hoping you're right, but im betting epic simply polished up those pics to wow everyone.imaheadcase - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Yah, i downloaded the demo. I was really disappointed. It gets boring really fast, like Quake Wars does. Nothing really innovating in terms of graphics, or fun factor, or "repeatability" over long term.I think TF2 ruined all these games. lol
Pjotr - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
This text does not match the graphs posted, where the max gain was 4.4% for ShangriLa, the other two tests showed close to 0% difference. Analysis mistake, graph error, typo or what?
Frallan - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Well since many of us today (yes even I bought one) has started to use Lappys and there is ones out now that where it is possible to play a view on how a 8600 GT w 512DDR2 and 256 DDR3 does would be nice and from 1680*1050 downwards. There are tons of these in lappys now so..Pretty please :)
Lifted - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Seconded.Blacklash - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Just grab ATiTool from Techpowerup! and reduce the clocks of the XT.Interesting article, and as someone said you have a chart with text referring to AMD above it and the actual CPU numbers labelled as Intel. The last four charts on the clock for clock page say AMD yet list Intel CPUs.
dvinnen - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Last time I checked, ATiTool dosen't support the HD 2900xt. Only one that I know of is a buggy peice of software from AMD to change clock speeds.NullSubroutine - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
Ati Tools works with 2900, I use it for my overclocking/fan contol.Ati Tray Tols does not work with the 2900. They are two different programs, Ati Tools is mainly for the things I use them for, while Tray Tools is a replacement for Catalyst Control Center.
Bjoern77 - Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - link
why bench the 2900 pro? is there a 2900pro which can't be clocked back to xt level? :)I'm glad i got a 2900pro for myself, regarding this benches i get 95% performance of a 8800gtx for 50% of it's price.