Benchmarks: Unreal Tournament 3, X3 Terran Conflict
As if it needed an introduction, Unreal Tournament 3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer game developed by Epic Games. The game was released on November 2007. Unreal Tournament 3 is actually the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series and the eighth Unreal game, but it's been numbered in terms of the engine it runs on (Unreal Engine 3).
When testing with Unreal Tournament 3 using the maximum quality in-game settings with AA/AF disabled, the Radeon HD 4850 comes out on top at 1920x1200, beating the GeForce 9800 GTX+ by just a single frame. Still, with well over 100fps on average, both graphics cards were able to deliver highly playable performance at this high resolution. The Radeon HD 4830 also touched on 100fps, while the GeForce 9800 GT managed 86fps.
The GeForce 9600 GT reached 73fps, while the Radeon HD 4670 was able to pump out 64fps. The Radeon HD 4650 was considerably slower with just 36fps which is just mildly playable with some stutter to be expected in high action scenes. The GeForce 8600 GTS was a fraction slower at 35fps, and the Radeon HD 2600XT managed 31fps.
X3 Benchmarks
X3: Terran Conflict, also known as X3TC, is a space combat simulator from German developer Egosoft and is the culmination of their X series of PC games. The game was released this past October.
Terran Conflict is based on an older game engine that at the time was used to show off some GPU's capabilities. With that in mind we were not surprised to have it putting quite the challenge for these affordable graphics cards.
The Radeon HD 4850 came out on top with 64fps, beating the GeForce 9800 GTX+ which averaged 61fps. The Radeon HD 4830 managed 59fps, followed by the GeForce 9800 GT with 52fps. Then we have the GeForce 9600 GT with 47fps or just a few frames above the Radeon HD 4760 with 44fps.
From this point on the performance numbers take a huge dive, with the next fastest graphics card being the GeForce 8600 GTS at just 25fps. Even at 1440x900 the GeForce 8600 GTS managed only 35fps, while the Radeon HD 4650 was limited to 32fps. Keep in mind we tested using maximum in-game quality settings with 4xAA/8xAF enabled.