Testing DirectX 10 capable cards on DirectX 9.0 games can be very misleading. If you are dropping $400 on a new card odds are you're not interested in two year old games or ones based on two year old technology.
Just why is it that the ATI 2900XT is out performed by its equivalent GeForce 8 series counterpart in most gaming benchmarks but in an Unreal Engine 3 based benchmark it out performs the highend nVidia 8800GTX by a significant margin?
Just why is it that the ATI 2900XT is out performed by its equivalent GeForce 8 series counterpart in most gaming benchmarks but in an Unreal Engine 3 based benchmark it out performs the highend nVidia 8800GTX by a significant margin?
SourceRight now there are only two notable games released for the PC that utilize Unreal Engine 3, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six Vegas (as above). Yet online reviewers prefer to use games such as 'Battlefield 2142', instead of a more modern alternative like GRAW.
This is a very surprising conclusion, the 8800GTX is higher priced than the 2900xt and rightly so, it is meant to be a highend card and outperforms the 2900XT on all benchmarks, but when UE3 is added to the equation it is left in the dust.
This may be because UE3 is very much enhanced to run on the 2900XT, given the 2900XT shares a lot with the Xbox 360 GPU and Epics dedication to optimising UE3 for the 360 GPU it could very well be that some of that optimization has carried over to the 2900XT.
Many high profile next gen games will be using UE3, the only other graphical power house that will be coming soon is Crysis and benchmarks for that are non-existant. As it stands the 2900XT may be sub par for older games, but for newer ones that are utilizing UE3 (at the least) it is in a league of its own. The price difference between the 8800GTX and the 2900XT is not to be scoffed at either, it is an amazing deal.
Rainbow Six Vegas is not even a DirectX 10 based game though it is a newer game than most others that are benchmarked and it clearly is swinging in the 2900XTs favor. The typical nVidia vs. ATI thing shouldn't be declared over until these cards are tested for what they're made for.
Even in the past this has been shown, especially with ATI cards, the 9700XT was outperformed by the 5700 Ultra (or matched) in many older benchmarks (for its time), however in newer games it was far superior to its counterpart. This may or may not hold true for the 2900XT however it is a little premature to call nVidia the winner based on games like Battlefield 2142.
VIA techy.Bytes
Update: Anandtech ran the same benchmark producing less spectacular results:
SourceThe 2900XT isn't out performing the 8800GTX but it is pretty much performing on par with it outpacing its direct nVidia rival.
