Unreal Tournament 2004 isn't one of the most recent games on the market, but it was one of the first 3D games to use DirectX 9 and is widely used by other games as the primary graphics engine. Because of this, benchmarking performance in Unreal Tournament gives a good idea about how the card will perform in other games based on the same engine.
All benchmarks were run using the ONS_Dria demo recording the resulting frame rates. Graphics details were all done from the default settings from the installation and in the 1280x1024 resolution. Anti-Aliasing is not supported within the game and must be set at the driver level.
The benchmarks showed some surprising data, particularly with SLI. The NVIDIA profile tool from the driver has SLI disabled for Unreal Tournament. Using registry hacks the modes can be switched to enable it in AFR or SFR mode, but in all cases the SLI did not show any performance increase and actually decreased the fps by a very small amount. This clearly shows that SLI is only effective if the graphics engine uses a renderer method that the SLI implementations by NVIDIA can actually accelerate.
Overclocking of the graphics either through the Auto function or manually did not give much of an impact into the overall performance. This clearly shows that the graphics engine is CPU limited.
At the 1280x1024 resolution, Unreal Tournament 2004 is very playable at the default settings and even at the 4x AA and 16x AF settings.
