Unreal Tournament 3 with PhysX

Arguably the most prominent game to support PhysX is Epic’s Unreal Tournament 3. For most maps, the physics load is quite light and you’d hardly notice anything special, so you’ll need to download the PhysX mod pack to really showcase what PhysX can do. The mod pack contains three custom levels, Heat Ray, Tornado, and Lighthouse. As its name implies, the Tornado map consists of a large tornado that’s sweeping through the map. With its high winds, the tornado shreds buildings, and if you get to close, it will suck you right in. The map also contains several destructible areas. Lighthouse takes that to another level, the whole world can practically be destroyed and its highly intensive.


Heat Ray also has a few destructible areas and features a gravity gun that lobs debris, hail, and other nearby objects at your opponent. This is the level we used for all our testing (we conducted our tests with a 30-player botmatch).

So how did the GeForce cards perform in UT3? Let’s see:





As you’d expect, the GeForce GTX 260 and 280 cards pulled away from the older GeForce boards. The 260 ran 35% faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX, while the GTX 280 was 5% faster than the GTX 260.

All of the PhysX-enabled GeForce boards ran significantly slower once PhysX effects were run on the CPU. GeForce GTX 280 performance is nearly three times slower when PhysX is running on the CPU, versus running those same effects on the GTX 280 GPU.

CPU PhysX performance is even worse with the older GPUs. The GeForce 9600 GT and 8800 GT both ran 3.5 times slower, while the 8800 GTS 640MB is four times slower with UT3 PhysX running on the CPU.