We could not have been happier with the performance of Unreal Tournament III! The game ran exceptionally well on every video card we tested it on. Some might say that it is the natural result of a game engine that has been in development for 3 years, but we think Epic deserves more credit than that. They've created a game with more detail packed into every cubic inch of gamespace than many games have in entire levels, and they've done so in such a way that a sub-$200 video card can play at 1920x1200, with the highest available in-game settings. That is simply unprecedented. Of course, ATI also deserves huge credit for bringing such a capable video card to market at such an excellent price with the Radeon HD 3850.

Anti-Aliasing performance was disappointing, presenting us with a huge performance penalty for even just 2X MSAA. This is likely due to the fact that multisampling floating-point surfaces is a very memory and GPU intensive task, and of course, UT3 uses some seriously high-resolution floating-point post-processing. But that very same post-processing also serves to reduce the need for AA, by obscuring some hard edges. Of course, it's not a perfect solution, and it sometimes has the opposite effect. But it works well enough to be effective on current hardware.

After testing, we were only left wishing that we could scale the packaged graphics even higher for our high-end video cards, instead of merely fiddling with the AA setting. We did see a real improvement in the gameplay experience with the most expensive video card in this evaluation, but not such an improvement to justify the very high price of entry into that product segment. If indeed there is a DX10 patch in the works this could possibly help justify the use of enthusiast-class video cards such as the 8800 GTX in this game.

The FPS smoothing feature was interesting, and further proves how important it is to look at gameplay performance experienced from video cards rather than raw average framerates in comparison. Just because a certain video card may produce overall higher framerates (the 8800 GTS/3850/3870 in this evaluation) doesn't mean they are inherently faster. With FPS smoothing enabled the GTX resulted in what looks like slower framerates, but those framerates were smoother. It is now time, more than ever, to concentrate on real-world gameplay experiences delivered by video cards rather than looking at average framerate bar charts to compare performance. Overall, we think that the Radeon HD 3850 is the best value for playing Unreal Tournament III, other games notwithstanding. If you are a UT nut (and we know you're out there), you will simply not find a better bang for your buck than the ATI Radeon HD 3850.