Next-Generation Game Performance with the Unreal Engine: 15-way GPU Shootout

While this is normally where our conclusion goes it should be said that the results we've shown you today are by no means conclusive. We're dealing with an engine that is still in development and over time, with the aid of the major graphics players performance should improve. What we have seen here however is a good starting point for what we can expect to see from the next-generation of games running at the highest possible settings. The performance can and will improve with efforts from ATI and NVIDIA as well as Epic's own efforts to make sure that owners of some of the slower cards will not be hung out to dry.

With that said we have discovered a few interesting things through this initial investigation of performance:

1) The Radeon 8500 does exceptionally well, only losing out to the GeForce3 Ti 500 at the highest resolution. The only question that remains is whether the performance will remain high with the fog issues fixed.

2) The original GeForce3, although very expensive for those that were early adopters, ends up being one of the top performers out of today's GPUs. It's good to know that not all year old technology is obsolete.

3) If these results are any indication, moving forward, GPU clock will actually play a much more important role than it has in the past. A delicate balance between GPU clock and memory clock, such as what was made possible on the GeForce3, will be ideal to obtain.

4) The low-end ATI and NVIDIA solutions don't perform very well at all, thus making it worth while to upgrade to one of the higher end cards.

There are still some questions that remain unanswered, including how effective hardware T&L actually is on slower systems. This is just one of many topics that we will be covering as our investigation continues.