I've been a member of there forum for many years so
I cut teeth on there reviews.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...50aHVzaWFzdA==

Unreal Tournament 3 Gameplay Performance and IQ

Here are some excerpts, good read every UT3 follower
should read..

Video Card Memory and UT3

We wanted to find out precisely what effect video card memory size capacity had on performance in UT3. Specifically, we wanted to know if a 512 MB video card was inherently better than a 256 MB video card, AA performance notwithstanding. This was born out of a quote from Tim Sweeney that UT3 would benefit with video cards that have 512 MB memory capacities over 256 MB memory capacities.


To make this test happen we are going to downclock our 512 MB Radeon HD 3870 to Radeon HD 3850 core and memory clock speeds. Remember, the only difference between the 3850 and 3870 are the clock speeds and memory capacities, they are the same GPU. Therefore by downclocking our 3870 to 3850 speeds we can directly compare a 256 MB 3850 vs. a 512 MB “3850.” We will test at a high resolution, 1920x1200 and maximum in-game settings to see if any differences in performance exist in this apples-to-apples test.

The difference we see here amounts to less than 3 frames per second average. That is not a significant difference, any way you slice it. Without considering AA performance, we found there to be no performance difference in UT3 at all between using a GPU with 512 MB of memory, and the same GPU with 256 MB of memory.


The same basic situation exists on the green side of the fence, comparing the 640 MB and 320 MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS. Aside from the ability to support high orders of AA at high resolutions, the 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS did not perform faster than the 320 MB version without AA. We had the same gameplay experience on both cards with AA disabled. It was only when we enabled AA that the 640 MB version began to perform better than the 320 MB version, which is understandable.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unleashing Unreal Tournament III


In the UTEngine.ini file, located in your "...\My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config" directory, you will see the following options in the "[Engine.GameEngine]" section:



bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE

MinSmoothedFrameRate=22

MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62

The first option, bSmoothFrameRate, is responsible for keeping framerate peaks down to lessen the spikes in performance. Ostensibly, this is done to make the gameplay feel smoother. We wanted to know exactly how much it affects performance, and if there is any good reason to disable it. To test it out, we set it to FALSE and re-ran the Apples-to-Apples test on our trusty GeForce 8800 GTX.

This graph is quite clear, with the bSmoothFrameRate option enabled framerates are smoother, but it can hardly be called an improvement in overall framerate performance. The whole point of such frame-limiting features is to keep CPU time available for other tasks, such as audio, network, input, and physics. If we were limited in such tasks by our CPU, we may consider this option useful, but we are not so limited.


With FPS smoothing disabled we see performance is very high, right where we’d expect it for a GTX. We would think a checkbox option in the game, reading something like "FPS Smoothing On/Off" would be appropriate, with the option disabled by default, and a tooltip explaining exactly what it does. As it is, the option is enabled by default, with no convenient way to disable it for gamers who aren't comfortable fiddling with INI files.


For online gameplay, the framerate rendering cap is at 60 FPS and there is a hard game rendering cap at 90 FPS, and there appears to be no way around it. This, we understand. The game's network code needs as much CPU time as it can get in order to reduce lag as much as possible. It just seems like this game could be performing even better if we were given the option in-game to turn FPS smoothing off.


This goes to show, you can’t really look at raw framerates anymore to judge how a game performs, with features such as FPS smoothing the entire dynamic of gameplay performance changes. It is now more important than ever to concentrate on gameplay performance rather than how many average framerates a video card achieves over another in a game.