Windows Benchmarks Continued

Unreal Tournament 3

Epic's latest installment of the Unreal Tournament series is based on the Unreal 3 engine, the same engine that powers games such as Gears of War, BioShock, and Stargate Worlds. When installed under Vista, Unreal Tournament 3 is able to utilize DirectX 10 for improved graphics and lighting. Like any graphical improvement however, there is a hit on performance, as the graphs below will show.

For this review, I've once again used ut3bench, which allows me to define my graphical settings and features. I'm only testing this card in DirectX 10 mode, to see how much performance I can get from the card.

Once again, the performance is very much similar to the Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Toxic.

3dMark Vantage

Futuremark's latest gaming benchmark is the pinnacle of gaming benchmarks and technology, as it may very well bring any setup to its very knees. Through a series of DirectX 10.1, Physics, and CPU tests, 3dMark Vantage measures every ounce of performance that a system is capable of, in every area the latest games utilize.

Again, the Ultimate falls between the Toxic and GeForce 8800GTX.

Final Thoughts on Windows

The Sapphire Radeon HD3870 Ultimate packs a punch, keeping up to the slightly faster Radeon HD3870 Toxic. I was surprised by this, considering the slightly slower clock speeds, and passive cooling.