18. DirectX 8: Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2003 is a very popular first-person shooter of the old school. At heart, the 3D engine it uses is an upgraded DirectX 7 engine with a smattering of DX 8 features. In order to give the graphics cards a real challenge, we tested them with the highest detail settings. In addition to the flyby demo in the package, we also used our own demo that we created in the Inferno map.

While the results with the Antalus flyby demo suggest that the Dell Inspiron 8600 and NVidia's GeForce FX Go5650 graphics chip are the more powerful solution, the THG Inferno demo showed that the combination of Athlon64 and ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 has more under the hood. The duo is forced to concede the lead by a whisker only at higher resolutions because of its 50% smaller video memory.

Using the 2xFSAA, the speed advantage of the AMD CPU coupled with the ATI graphics chip becomes even clearer.