GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 - July 2002

Memory Bandwidth Comparison

Just for kicks we wanted to start off with our homemade memory bandwidth test to compare some of the more bandwidth-happy solutions:

Unreal Tournament 2003 Memory Bandwidth Test NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 (64MB) NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 (128MB) NVIDIA GeForce3 (64MB) NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB) NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 (64MB) NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (128MB) ATI Radeon 8500 (128MB) ATI Radeon 8500LE (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 77.4 68.8 66.2 62.2 60.9 54.3 53.4 39.4 35.9 27.6 | 0 | 15 | 31 | 46 | 62 | 77 | 9

As proof that this test is entirely memory bandwidth limited we actually decreased only the memory clock speed of a GeForce4 and found that the test scales almost perfectly linearly with memory bandwidth; you can see examples of this when comparing the four GeForce4 cards to one another.

It is interesting to note that the GeForce3 Ti 500, despite its lesser memory bandwidth, actually ends up being faster than the Ti 4400 in this test. Without knowing about the inner workings of the GeForce3 GPU vs. the GeForce4 GPU, we hypothesize that the GeForce3 could have larger internal caches that give it the performance edge here. In making room for the second vertex shader unit, nView and all of the additional features in the GeForce4 it is highly likely that NVIDIA reduced the GeForce3's cache size, which would help tremendously in this benchmark.

The Radeon 8500 doesn't do well in this benchmark at all, despite the fact that it does have a competitive amount of memory bandwidth. But the main reason we pursued this test was to see how the Parhelia performed; in this case, the 27.6 fps is an indication that its 256-bit memory bus isn't doing much for the Parhelia at all.

Let's move on to the actual game tests...