Unreal Tournament: PC Performance Benchmarks for Graphics Cards and Processors

BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME

Developer : Epic Games
Publisher : Epic Games
Platforms : PC
Genre : FPS Free-to-play online

 

The game Unreal Tournament, which does not yet have an exact name, is being developed on the Unreal Engine 4 and will be released on PC, Mac and Linux. An important point: it will be distributed under a shareware subscription. Epic Games prefers to avoid the term and say that their game will be "just free". It is being developed by a small team of veterans who created the original Unreal Tournament. Fans with a subscription to Unreal Engine 4 will actively help in the development of the project. A lot of attention will be paid to custom modifications: Epic Games will organize a marketplace where modders can sell their work. Developers will take a percentage of sales, this is all the money they plan to receive from the new Unreal Tournament.

Epic Games plans to make a game that will never end, which will be constantly updated. Unreal Tournament will make the competitive first-person shooter genre evolve and become a great springboard for talented developers.

THE GRAFICAL PART

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Unreal Tournament is supported on major Windows operating systems, which include Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 , Mac and Linux . Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers and will not receive support. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for Unreal Tournament is  DirectX 11 . 

Game engine

Unreal Tournament is powered by the Unreal Engine 4, developed and maintained by Epic Games. this is the first game created on this engine and should simply amaze everyone with stunning graphics. The developers, judging by the screenshots, would have been quite praised for the previous versions of the engine, as well. in the foreground in the horror genre is not a picture. It is important to establish artificial intelligence, called the Director (eng. AI Director), which affects the gameplay, adjusting to the level of the players and changing the game parameters. Thanks to his work, each playthrough of the game is unique and inimitable, which increases the replayability of the game.

The first game created on the engine - Unreal - appeared in 1998. Since then, various versions of this game engine have been used in over a hundred games, including Deus Ex, Dishonored, Lineage II, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Postal 2, the Brothers in Arms series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, as well as in the well-known game series Unreal and Unreal Tournament from Epic Games themselves. Being adapted primarily for first-person shooters, the engine was also used to create games of other genres. 

Written in the high-level C++ language, Unreal Engine 4 allows you to create games for most operating systems and platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube. In December, Mark Rein demonstrated Unreal Engine 3 on the iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS. In March 2010, the engine was demonstrated on the Palm Pre communicator based on the webOS mobile platform.

 

To simplify porting, the engine uses a modular system of dependent components: supports various rendering systems (Direct3D, OpenGL, Pixomatic; previously supported Glide API, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL), sound playback (EAX, OpenAL, DirectSound3D; previously supported A3D), voice playback tools text, speech recognition (only for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Windows, also planned for Linux and Mac), modules for networking and support for various input devices.

 

For online play, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and GameSpy technologies are supported, including up to 64 players (clients) at the same time. Despite the fact that the development tools do not officially include support for a large number of clients on a single server, the engine has been used to create MMORPG games. One of the most famous representatives of the genre, Lineage II, uses the Unreal Engine. 

 

Advanced game settings

 

Unreal Tournament has a not very solid, but sufficient range of graphic settings, to which all aspects of the graphic component of the game are subject.

   

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

The picture quality between different settings in Unreal Tournament is quite impressive.

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

In 4K, Unreal Tournament doesn't look as we would like, apparently the game lacks ultra-high resolution textures.

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

Activating full-screen anti-aliasing anti-aliasing practically eliminates all "surface roughness", but it blurs the picture quite a lot.

General visual design and game physics

It's still too early to talk about a new game in the Unreal Tournament series - at the moment the game is at an early stage of development and only one map is fully ready. Other game cards are under development and lack all the features of  Unreal Engine 4.

 

   

Next, we will go directly to the gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as the performance indicator. Below is a video of the test segment:    

Our video cards were tested at resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at very high and maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Unreal Tournament. AMD CrossFireX and SLI are currently not supported by the game.

 

Testing at 1920x1080 resolution

 

    

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

  

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon R7 260X or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. 

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

    

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. The best solutions would be   the Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 760.

Testing at 3840x2160 resolution

     

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2160

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon R9 290 or GeForce GTX 780 level showed an acceptable FPS.   Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 Ti would be the best solutions  .

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were taken as an indicator at resolutions of  1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1080 will be 2048 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 3076 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 4096 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

     

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080

 

The CPU performance in the game is sufficient for all models.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel % 

 

Loading of processor cores  at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD % 

 

Unreal Tournament is disproportionately capable of supporting up to 6 processing threads, but only 4 processing cores are fully utilized.

RAM test

The test was carried out on the base configuration Core i 7 5960X @ 4.6 GHz with 16GB DDR4 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. All used RAM was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Unreal Tournament is at the level of 800 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

On a 6 GB system, Unreal Tournament consumes about 2.5 GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2.7 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, total memory consumption was almost 3.1 GB. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 4  gigabytes of RAM.