Benchmarks - Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament has to be the most relevant benchmark available for testing performance of these graphics cards in a real life environment. Unfortunately for NVIDIA our fears about the performance of the FX5600 were confirmed. Performance was noticeably worse than the Ti4200, which we believe to be the card the FX5600 will replace, in the standard tests. Only once the image enhancing features were used did we see the expected improvement from the FX5600. As we have seen earlier texture definition in the ti4200 seems better with AA and AF enabled, therefore the performance of the FX5600 would appear to be at the expense of quality.
Choosing between the Ti4200 and the FX5600 for playing UT2003 is a difficult decision. If you intend to play at a very high resolution (1600x1200) neither card will be smooth with AA and AF enabled, therefore the Ti4200 would be faster. On the other hand if you are prepared to play at 1024x768 with AA and AF the FX5600 would be fastest, although the Ti4200 would produce better textures.
Putting the Ti4200 / FX5600 battle to one side for a moment the FX5200 remains a clear winner compared to the Radeon 9000. In all but one test the FX5200 is superior.
