MSI N280GTX OC HydroGen
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.
Race Driver: Grid is a visually taxing game that presents a challenge to any graphics system. Results were recorded using FRAPS to log the average FPS over a 2 minute race. To ensure consistency, the same track, car and general path of travel was used in each of the 5 benchmark runs for each graphics card, with an average FPS being calculated from the median three results.
Company of Heroes is Relic’s first title to make use of the “Essence Engine”. This engine was designed and coded from scratch by Relic in order to make use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. On May 29, 2007 Relic released a DX10 patch for Company of Heroes which was applied for this test. Running the in game performance test 5 times, the highest and lowest scores were omitted with the average calculated from the remaining 3.
Results Analysis
Mirroring the 3DMark benchmarks, the HydroGen card puts its stock clocked brother firmly in its place. It also gives the GTX285 a good run for its money and thanks to the PhysX capabilities all Nvidia cards score very highly in Unreal Tournament III. GRID remains a strong point for ATI despite the high clocks of the Hydrogen and the newly released drivers from Nvidia.
Let’s head over to the next set of benchmarks…
