Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition

As odd as it may seem, every single game we currently use for our graphic card benchmarking is a sequel or an entry in a series of games, including this one. The original Unreal Tournament launched in late 1999, and since then, it has become a stature with GPU benchmarking. Similar to Call of Duty, the UT series of games is one that manages to deliver spectacular graphics, but doesn’t require a bleeding-edge machine to see them.

UTIII offers a variety of modes and levels, and has some of the most interesting and lush environments ever seen in a video game. If I could choose where I wanted to die, it would most likely be in the Gateway level, which you can see in the screenshot below. This level is one of the most interesting in the game as it’s essentially three levels in one, linked together with portals – and it’s hard to beat the feeling of scoring a portal frag.

The game might be one of the best-looking currently on the PC, but it doesn’t offer robust in-game settings like some others in our suite. Because of this, we are forced to enable anti-aliasing in the control panel of the current graphics card. Both ATI’s and NVIDIA’s drivers allow us to choose 4xAA, so that’s what we stick with throughout all of our testing.

The tradition continues. Palit’s pre-overclocked HD 4870 consistently outperforms the stock-clocked model, which isn’t at all a surprise. To play in the big leagues though (2560×1600, 4xAA), a beefier GPU is almost a requirement, especially if you play online (it would be odd if you didn’t).

Like most of the GPUs in our line-up, enabling the 4xAA is a bad move with this card. Only NVIDIA’s GTX 280 and ATI’s HD 4870 X2 manage to play well with anti-aliasing at our highest resolution, but luckily enough, the game still looks fantastic without it.