3dfx Voodoo5 5500

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.

It should be noted that the Unreal Tournament scores are not only useful for looking at UT performance, but also for games based on the UT engine, such as the recently released Deus-Ex.

While UnrealTournament does offer native support for Glide, we refrained from testing the Voodoo5 in Glide. Why? Have a look at the performance numbers taken from a Voodoo5 running UnrealTournament in Glide vs Direct3D:

The first thing to notice is that there is no performance difference between 16 and 32-bit color when running in Glide, this is most likely due to UnrealTournament not allowing 32-bit color/textures when running in Glide, especially since the scores were perfectly identical between 16 and 32-bit color modes.

Secondly, as the resolution increases, the performance of the Voodoo5 running in Glide mode drops below that of Direct3D indicating that it wasn't meant to be run at such high resolutions, which is one possible explanation.

Regardless, the UnrealTournament scores were already difficult to explain because of the number of limitations acting on the UnrealTournament engine (look back at our reasons that UnrealTournament isn't a good benchmark) and adding Glide scores wouldn't do much good other than adding two more lines to the graphs.