XFX 280GTX XXX Edition

 

Unreal Tournament 3 the latest game in the long running Unreal series from Epic Games and Midway. The game uses the latest UE3, 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.

 

 

  

Quite clearly PhysX has had a drastic effect on FPS, boosting the GTX280 XXX’s score well above the rest. If this is a sign of things to come then NVidia could well wipe the floor with ATI, even the almighty 4870×2 cannot keep pace. It’s nice to see that not only are the synthetic benchmarks increased by the new technology but games as well. The GTX280 XXX also is the cheapest of the 3 cards on test when valued against FPS.

 

 

 

Crysis is without doubt one of the most visually stunning and hardware-challenging games to date. By using CrysisBench – a tool developed independently of Crysis – we performed a total of 5 timedemo benchmarks using a GPU-intensive pre-recorded demo. To ensure the most accurate results, the highest and lowest benchmark scores were then removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

 

 

Call of Duty 4 is a stunning DirectX 9.0c based game that really looks awesome and has a very full feature set. With lots of advanced lighting, smoke and water effects, the game has excellent explosions along with fast gameplay. Using the in-built Call Of Duty features, a 10-minute long game play demo was recorded and replayed on each of the GPU’s using the /timedemo command a total of 5 times. The highest and lowest FPS results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

  

Predictably, non-PhysX enabled games are still owned by the 4870×2 but the overclocked GTX280 still puts in a decent effort, finishing higher than it’s stablemate stock GTX280 while also being better value for money.