ATI Rage Fury MAXX

Since Unreal Tournament is affected by more factors than just video card driver quality at 640 x 480 the DDR GeForce and Rage Fury MAXX are virtually tied for the first place spot at 640 x 480. All of the cards perform respectably here, the Savage 2000 is held back by the poor D3D performance of its drivers.

The Voodoo3 cards excel in this test because we were forced to use the Glide setting for the UT tests with the 3dfx cards, the D3D setting would not complete our tests properly. In any case, if you're into playing UT, then the Voodoo3 with its native Glide support will give you excellent gameplay simply because UT was designed with superb Glide support. The D3D and especially the OpenGL performance under UT is not up to par with its Glide performance at all, giving the 3dfx cards the edge in the UT tests.

For those of you wondering about Athlon 700 performance, the standings are identical to that of the Pentium III 700.

Once again there is very little difference between the DDR GeForce and the Rage Fury MAXX, making a recommendation for the more expensive DDR GeForce very difficult unless you play games other than UT (i.e. Quake III Arena, in which case the DDR GeForce would give you the better overall experience).

The Voodoo3 is once again performing quite respectably as a result of its native Glide support.

The Savage 2000 holds up the rear as it is begging S3 for updated drivers. Fortunately, S3 has recently released MeTaL support for the Savage 2000, allowing it to take advantage of the S3TC compressed textures found on the second Unreal Tournament CD.

The 1600 x 1200 scores you see above won't change all that much as we cycle through the various processors. The DDR GeForce finally separates itself from the Rage Fury MAXX but not by a huge amount.

The Savage 2000 finally moves up the ladder as a result of its efficient memory management, with some driver tweaks for D3D performance it wouldn't be surprising to see the Savage 2000 perform even better. Keep an eye on this card, if S3 can get their act together with their next driver update (due out in January), the Savage 2000 may end up being the "low-cost" (compared to the GeForce and other cards in its class) high performing card that we were promised on paper a few months ago.

The native Glide support can only do so much for the Voodoo3 cards, at 1600 x 1200 the cards begin to show their limits as they fall down below the average performing TNT2 Ultra.