[PCGH] Borderlands PC: Graphics cards benchmarks with Unreal Engine 3

THe guys at PCGH put the unreal engine 3 powered game Borderlands through the paces. Twelve different graphics cards from Geforce GTX 285 to Radeon HD 5870. Suprise: Ati hasn't obviously optimized their drivers yet as GTX-260 beats HD 5870 easily.

[Nihilism]

that's pretty punishing for UE3... i guess my hopes of running other new games like dragon age with 16qaa have gone down the drain

[Winter47th]

Not exactly downhill, but the game replaces the lost details from the Concept Art with very heavy techs, I'm having a blast with it, still it's unforgiven on the specs. Wait for a patch.

[JsonHenry]

I was wondering why my HD5870 was only pulling down 40-50fps on average.

The weird part about it is - I can turn on 24xAA through CCC (the game has no ingame AA options,so you have to force it) and it does not make one bit of a performance difference but improves the visual quality drastically. I thought mabye my dual core 6000+ was limiting my card and it was time for me to finally buy a quad-core CPU. But I guess I should wait and see what AMD does about drivers or hope for an optimization patch from Gearbox.

[Nihilism]

once you start running high res with aa, cpu becomes almost irrelevant, i saw some crysis benchmarks a few days ago that compared the fastest quad core to a basic dual core (2.4ghz i think) with a gtx295, and at 1680*1050 with 8aa, there was only 1 frame difference across all the setups. unless you consider getting 120 frames instead of 150 running at 720p with no aa a bottlneck ( which is pretty much the only time games becomes cpu bound) then don't worry about upgrading. It's nice having a quad but unnecessary for gaming atm

[JsonHenry]

@ above, you are 100% correct.

I WISH there was a reason to use a quad core in games, but as it stands right now the only game that really benefits from a quad core CPU is Supreme Commander.

[evrfighter]

I can't seem to force AA on my 4890 no matter what I try.

Tried forcing through CCC. Tried forcing it through .ini file with no luck. I didn't see an option for it on d3doverride like some posts have said.

But the good news is I run it @1080p everything else maxed out and it usually stays capped @60fps. I had to enable vsync as I was getting screen tearing on my LED monitor so I'm not sure what I max out at.

[Nihilism]

supreme commander is the whole reason i upgraded my pc....i was gaming on a laptop with 128mb graphics before i built this pc. Quad still doesn't help supcom much, that game is brutal, there is a program called 'core maximiser' specifically made for supcom that you can download which will re-allocates threads based on the number of cpu cores you have, i always run it as it makes it run just that little bit better

[iamgoatman]

Those numbers are pretty harsh, but hopefully patches should help.

I'm running an XFX 8800GT with a E8400 @ 3.8Ghz, 40FPS is easily playable as long as it's semi stable. Hopefully with some tweaks that number will increase, but I average that on Crysis on all high settings, 1680x1050 and 2xAA. Sounds like some poor optimization.

[STONEY4]

Runs perfect for me. I love the game, but it gives me a headache if I play it too long.