Benchmarking with UT2004 Demo?

[pauldh]

Glad it keeps you happy. I won't argue with you as I am not there watching you play. UT2004/03 are pretty amazing games that way, but if you play MOHAA and average low 30fps, gameplay is gonna blow when the shotties and smgs come near ya. As a matter of fact, you lose a good 10fps every time ya pull the trigger in that game. Of course also remember your max settings on a GF2 aren't the same as someone else with a true DX8 card or newer. I remember when UT2003 first came out, a friend with a radeon 32DDR was blow away when he saw the visual difference on my system. Same system as his, built them at the same time, but I had uprgraded to a radeon 8500. I think he said "whoa... you got grass, looks much better on your system" He then went and purchased a radeon 8500le and got the extra eye candy for himself.

But even though you disagree with us, the millions of people who upgraded from GF2, GF3, Radeon cards don't dissagree. I mean if a GF2 getting 20-30fps showed no vissual slow downs at all, why the need for this forum, Radeon 9X cards, or FX cards. I am not trying to be a jerk, honestly. But the FX5200 and GF4-mx440 would be kings and lots of us would have more money for other uses. Maybe I should ebay my new 9800 pro and pop in my old GF2 Ti.

ABIT IS7, P4 2.6C, 512MB Corsair TwinX PC3200LL, Radeon 9800 Pro, Santa Cruz, TruePower 430watt

 

[Vimp]

I understand what your saying Pauldh and quite frankly I am more or less bragging about my results because I am really pleased with just how well my card does play todays latest games. However UT03 and UT04 are unique games in my opinion because they don't show significant differences at lower frame rates when compared to other games. This is even shown in my results which only showed a low of 27fps even though my average was 33fps which shows that UT dosn't fluctuate in performance like most games where you can average even higher frame rates but then when anything happens on your screen your fps shoot down dramaticly as happens in some games I know. As far as losing out on visuals UT03 and 04 are unique here as well because these UT games some how use special effects that are shown almost identically on DX9 cards as they are on my DX7 card where as most newer games these days don't work that way. And these are the very reasons why I said in my original post that I don't feel the UT games are good to use as benchmarks since they work so well on older cards and don't make much if any use of DirectX effects that arn't available on DX7 cards. The water effects for instance look the exact same on my card as they do in the screenshots I look at on gamesites, infact the whole screenshot looks identical to what I see on my comp. The only things I miss out on in UT are AA and AF visual quality since my card dosn't do those things.

<font color=blue>_____________________________________</font color=blue>
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Asus A7N8X-X, Athelon XP 2500+ Barton,
Samsung 512mb DDR400, Creative Geforce2 GTS,
SoundBlaster Live! Value.

 

[splenda20]

You make a good argument about UT not being the best game to benchmark. But please let me clarify something here right now! You may think that there isn't much of a visual difference when you look at screenshots of UT2004 and compare it to your DX7 GeForce 2, but I promise you there is a HUGE DIFFERENCE. I wanted to test what you said so I took some screenshots of UT2003 (I didn't use 2004 cause the demo has low res textures) running on my notebook (P4 2.4B, R7500 with 32Megs of DDR) and screenshots of the game from my desktop PC (2100XP, R9500Pro) and compared them. While they looked very similar when comparing the screenshots, seeing them in action was a very different story. My DX7 notebook wasn't nearly as crisp and there was a lack of polish to the entire game. Textures were more bland and the bright explosions and lustre of the effects were much more dull. But it looked fantastic on my desktop, just like it's supposed to, everything was really great looking.
So, I don't mean to be rude or disappoint you, but if you think you aren't missing out on visual quality on your DX7 card, you're sadly mistaken.
BTW: To make sure I was right about what I saw, I ran a LAN game with only my two computers and looked at the same scenes side by side at the same time. Same everything so there could be no discrepencies.

 

[Vimp]

Well acually splenda20 I wouldn't be disapointed at all if what your saying is the case. I am merely speaking based on what I have percieved to be the case. However I have ordered a new video card which I should recieve in the next couple days and I would be very pleased if I found that my perceptions were all wrong and that there is a big difference. However I'm not very hopefull.

<font color=blue>_____________________________________</font color=blue>
Vancouver, Canada
Asus A7N8X-X, Athelon XP 2500+ Barton,
Samsung 1024mb DDR400, Creative Geforce2 GTS,
SoundBlaster Live! Value.

 

[splenda20]

Mazel Tov
You definately will notice the difference!!! What card did you decide on?

 

[Vimp]

I ordered a MSI 5900XT.

<font color=blue>_____________________________________</font color=blue>
Vancouver, Canada
Asus A7N8X-X, Athelon XP 2500+ Barton,
Samsung 1024mb DDR400, Creative Geforce2 GTS,
SoundBlaster Live! Value.

 

[Vimp]

hogfather wrote:

How do I fix the impossible to read menus? Its all very blurry.

Vapor wrote:

They're always blurry...cranking up antialiasing might help, but doubtful. Cranking resolutions do nothing, I run at 1600x1200 and it's still nasty looking. I'd imagine the full version will have cleaner looking menus.

I didn't give these comments a second thought at first because I didn't notice any blurring in the menus at all. However shortly there after all of a sudden I played the game and the text in the menus was almost unreadable. So natrually I thought this must be what you were talking about and that perhaps its a random bug with the game or something. But it just so happens that I had changed my videocard settngs from the desktop for performance/quality from a medium blend (default) to pure performance because I was gonna do a benchmark and wanted better performance. But I forgot to change the setting back afterword and it was after that that I noticed the text in UT04 was all of a sudden very blurry. So having come to finnally realize the cause (took me a couple days to figure it out), I went and changed my settings to pure quality and now UT04 is very crisp and clear again. I'd like to point out that I was noticing the same blurry problem the last couple days in other games as well but to a lesser degree then UT04.

<font color=blue>_____________________________________</font color=blue>
Vancouver, Canada
Asus A7N8X-X, Athelon XP 2500+ Barton,
Samsung 1024mb DDR400, Creative Geforce2 GTS,
SoundBlaster Live! Value.

 

[Vapor]

I've had mine on full quality :frown: .

Maxtor disgraces the six letters that make Matrox.