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Unreal Tournament 2003

We only had the demo version and for our purposes, it worked just fine. All details were set to the highest possible levels. I mentioned earlier that Comanche4 may not be the best application to judge the visual quality of any graphics adapter unless we are merely looking at some gross artifacts. CodeCreatures is a somewhat different story but as mentioned as well, it does not challenge the texture units too much. For the evaluation of image quality, we could have used 3DMark2001SE but since 3DMark is such widely used, chances are that the drivers were optimized for this particular application and for this particular application only. Quake3 Arena is another possibility but quite frankly, I am getting tired of looking at it. Which leaves Unreal Tournament 2003.

Screen shot at 1024 x 768 x 32 bpp at the default setting showing two problems of the X600. First, if you look at the arrows on the walkway, instead of a smooth transition, there is an abrupt jump from one MIP level to the next. Second, the pink "power booster" or whatever it is called appears washed out and does not show any of the light arcs that usually symbolize the high charged energy.

From earlier reviews of the Xabre400 on xbit-labs and on Tech-Report we know that SIS has been using a feature called TexTurbo which increases the fill rate albeit at the expense of quality of texture mapping and LOD. Moving the slider from the default setting to quality changes both the TexTurbo and the QualTex setting to 01.

TexTurbo registry entry is set to 03 by default. Further up is the QualTex entry set to 0 by default. While we did not really find any meaningful changes with the latter, changing TexTurbo to 00 or 01 improved the image quality quite substantially.

Setting the TexTurbo entry to 00 eliminates the abrupt jumps in MIP levels and overall increases the image quality dramatically, however, the LOD is still way below any of the other cards used in this roundup. The insert shows what the "energizer" is supposed to look like (taken from a screenshot with the Tachyon G9000 Pro). Moving the slider to the "Quality" setting did not noticeably improve the LOD, the "energizer" still looks washed out.

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