03 - Unreal Tournament 3

Click here to open Unreal Tournament 3 with and without PhysX acceleration graphs (opens in new window)

With PhysX running on the CPU, the game becomes CPU-limited to 30fps no matter what graphics card we used, despite our test PC using a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 overclocked to 3.33GHz.

With the graphics card doing the PhysX work, as expected, we found that faster hardware gave a higher frame rate. This is no surprise, as with PhysX hardware acceleration enabled, the graphics card is not only trying to calculate all the PhysX effects, but it also has to render the image as quickly as possible. It's good to see that Unreal Tournament 3 still runs fine even on the relatively lowly GeForce 8800 GT at 1,680 x 1,050. A minimum of 41fps is great.

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