Unreal Tournament III

Unreal Tournament III

Notes

We used the botmatch technique for benchmarking Unreal Tournament, populating our map with 24 characters, 12 to a side.

At 800x600 it’s Intel by a significant margin. To be fair, that Q6600 is quite a bit more expensive than any of the other processors in this evaluation; however, the E8400 is priced much more competitively. All three X3 chips perform comparably. The X4 even manages to file in amongst them.

Benchmarking Unreal Tournament III is about as consistent as tapioca pudding, and we keep running into situation where the scores at 1280x1024 are regularly (and reproducibly) higher than the numbers at 800x600. Thus, the results are even more pronounced at 1280x1024, where Intel CPUs again rule the roost.

Stepping up to 1600x1200 shows up a situation similar to where we were at 800x600. Only now, the quad-core Phenom X4 is stretching its legs a bit to outpace the X3s. We recently had the chance to ask Epic’s Tim Sweeny some questions about how Unreal Tournament uses threading and his answers will be part of an upcoming scaling piece. For now, know that the app is able to fully utilize a quad-core chip’s onboard resources.