ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks

Game Testing - Unreal Tournament 3

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) continues to be one of our favorite games and as such tends to be one of the more scrutinized titles when it comes to graphics performance. This fast-action first-person shooter demands high frame rates if you are to be successful playing against others online. The slightest bit of lag or the occasional jerky picture response can quickly degrade the game playing experience to the point of absolute frustration. UT3 also happens to be quite demanding when it comes to CPU performance.

Much like Crysis, UT3 frame rates at lower resolutions will suffer with slower memory subsystems. We have found UT3 to be very latency sensitive, which is one of the reasons why the Intel X48 chipset stands out so well at 1280x1024.

By moving to the higher 1920x1200 resolution, we can see exactly where the graphic system becomes the bottleneck and limits the average frame rate to about 100FPS regardless of CPU speed. As we have seen before, the 750i and 780i fall behind in SLI, with as much as a 50% performance improvement to be had when moving up to 790i. At these frame rates though, this extra performance margin would be much better put to use with 4xAA/16x AF turned on.

Unlike Crysis, UT3 benefits from the use of our QX9770, more so without SLI than with. The ever-ensuing tradeoff between which subsystem becomes the performance limiter should stick out as a common theme by now. Discounting SLI configurations, Intel's X48 holds the lead here due to the reduced memory latencies experienced with this chipset.

At higher resolutions, UT3 does benefit from the QX9770 CPU, but not because of what you might think. Improved SLI scaling due to the abundance of processing power allows for slightly better average frame rates when using more than one GPU. The lower cap at around 100FPS is still present with the single-GPU configurations. If we were going to build a SLI system for playing UT3, it would be with the goal of running high AA/AF levels at a resolution of 1920x1200.