NVIDIA GeForce2 MX

UnrealTournament Performance

Quake III Arena is still the best gaming benchmark because it scales properly with CPU speed as well as the resolution it is run at. It also implements most of the features that upcoming games (first person shooters) will be using and thus provides an excellent metric for card performance under Quake III Arena, as well as the performance of the card in general.

Unfortunately, there is no Direct3D equivalent of Quake III Arena in terms of a good benchmark, as UnrealTournament, while it is a great game, is a horrible benchmark. Results in UnrealTournament vary greatly and the game does not scale very well with CPU speed or with resolution. We included benchmarks using our own UnrealTournament benchmark, but the results aren’t nearly as reliable as those from Quake III Arena.

In general, the performance of UnrealTournament on a system is just fine with a TNT2/Voodoo3 at resolutions of 1024 x 768 x 16 and below; once you get above that mark, you begin to hit the fill rate limitations of the TNT2/Voodoo3.

In the end, the benchmarks you should pay the most attention to are the Quake III Arena benchmarks, because those say the most about the performance of the card. If you’re a big UT fan, you should be fine with something that’s around TNT2 speed as long as you’re going to keep the resolution below 1024 x 768. If you go above that, you’ll need something that has a higher fill rate than a TNT2 (i.e. GeForce or Voodoo4/5). If you’re going to draw any conclusions from the UnrealTournament benchmarks, be sure to pay the most attention to the scores above 800 x 600 because the game is limited by more than one factor at lower resolutions.