Unreal Tournament 2003	Source: Epic

Unreal Tournament 2003 is the sequel to 1999's multiple 'Game of the Year' award winner. It uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology - where graphics, sound and game play are taken beyond the bleeding edge. Unreal Tournament 2003 employs the use of Vertex as well as Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a DirectX 8 videocard to get the most out of the game.

UT2003 Demo 640x480 Flyby
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	P4 3.2C/Gigabyte 8KNXP (200/400)	266.33
2.	P4 3.2C/Epox 4PDA2+ (200/400)	264.53
3.	P4 3.2C/SiS 655FX Ref Board (200/400)	256.94
4.	P4 3.2C/VIA PT880 Ref Board (200/400)	257.67
5.	P4 3.2C/VIA PT880 Ref Board (211/422)	270.76

UT2003 Demo 640x460 Botmatch
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	P4 3.2C/Gigabyte 8KNXP (200/400)	88.55
2.	P4 3.2C/Epox 4PDA2+ (200/400)	87.99
3.	P4 3.2C/SiS 655FX Ref Board (200/400)	85.29
4.	P4 3.2C/VIA PT880 Ref Board (200/400)	85.69
5.	P4 3.2C/VIA PT880 Ref Board (211/422)	89.87

Again the Intel based motherboards pull out a slight lead but it's marginal and you're definitely not going to notice the difference when you're gaming!

VIA's for real with their PT880

While VIA have been relatively absent from the Intel chipset world for quite some time, they have certainly come back to the forefront with their guns blazing.

Despite being badly beaten in the AthlonXP arena (KT600... cough, cough), VIA have shown they are able to regroup, and have since taken the Athlon64 performance crown. As drivers mature VIA also has the potential to steal away the Pentium 4 from the looks of what we have seen the PT880 chipset tackle.

Please remember that the PT880 chipset in the reference board is not final silicon, and the companies engineers may very well be able to squeeze out a bit more performance with the final revision. In any event, we can comment on hypothetical's, so let's look at what we've actually seen.

Built from the ground up, the VIA PT880 has a strong memory controller. Dubbed DualStream64, VIA promised better data prefetch and improved memory branch prediction and it's safe to say that they delivered. In terms of bandwidth (traditionally VIA's weak point) the PT880 scores just as well as Intel's i875P in SiSoft Sandra, and just a tad lower in the memory portion of PCMark2002.

As you can clearly see from the benchmarks the PT880 is fast. In 2D applications the PT880 pretty much matches both Intel and SiS' offerings. In 3D apps, the chipset is 2-3% slower than the i875P. While the reference board did have overclocking options, we didn't get very far. I guess we'll all have to wait for a retail board to find the answer to that question.

We were also impressed with VIA's Envy24PT audio controller; supporting 7.1 audio, Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES puts it in good running to negate the need for a PCI based soundcard. From our conversation with VIAs representative, retail motherboards are now available and since they're using final silicon, expect them to be yet a bit faster!

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